My daughter's state sixth form college got more Oxbridge offers than Eton this year.
Eton restricts the number of applicants it puts forward. Whether that is or isn't meritocratic is another issue but Oxbridge won't take more than one Etonian per college.
Also increasingly Oxbridge and other top universities demand higher grades from private school pupils
That's because a private school pupil with, say, AAB does worse on average than a state school pupil with AAB. (See, for example, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339899/ for data in medical school performance.) Private schools provide so much support, they flatter the student's grades, so you need to adjust for that.
More persecution of the privately educated.
I have been more discriminated in this country because of my private education than my ethnicity or religion.
I really deserve a medal/compensation for this bigotry.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
But Grey Goose is a brand name and so it would be 3 Grey Gooses just as it is 20 Rothmans not 20 Rothmen.
My daughter's state sixth form college got more Oxbridge offers than Eton this year.
Eton restricts the number of applicants it puts forward. Whether that is or isn't meritocratic is another issue but Oxbridge won't take more than one Etonian per college.
Also increasingly Oxbridge and other top universities demand higher grades from private school pupils
I was chatting to a fellow at my old college. They have stats that show as they recruit more from the maintained sector based on assessed potential rather than flat exam results, they get better degree results at the other end. They are up to 75% of home students from the maintained sector this year.
With the same A level results maybe, hardly surprising as you have to work harder to get those A levels from an average comp than a top independent school.
However, overall ' ..73 per cent of state school graduates gained a first or upper second class degree compared with 82 per cent of independent school graduates'
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
Far less so than the far right, sadly.
(Snip)
I'm far from convinced that's correct. I'd make a firm guess that most of the people going on pro-Palestine/Hamas marches are left-wing, and they've been mobilised very successfully. The one far right march I've encountered (*) was about six men surrounded by dozens of police (*)
(*) Two, if an Orange Order march in Liverpool is 'right' wing. Those guys looked so stern and unhappy I wondered if they'd be happier and more content just being at home in front of the TV...
Okay, the left is willing to march on the streets. But why is that? Because the left has no belief that the institutional powers will react through the democratic means presented - such as voting or talking to your representative (because both major parties agree on the policy solution). Whereas the far right, currently, are being catered to, again, by both political parties (on immigration, on trans rights, on the enforcement of capitalism, etc.). Street fascists are still mobilising, we see that with attacks on hotels and in Dover, but that is typically people who think the already harsh measure brought in to satiate their blood lust are not far enough. And, again, they are still being pandered to with things like the Rwanda bill.
The idea that the far right is having its fascistic policies implemented by UK governments on inward migration (record levels), trans rights (moderate policies in place), and compulsory capitalism (the state manages about half of all expenditure in the UK), is nonsense.
On half of all government expenditure, it seems to be that a lot of government expenditure is now managed in such a way as to maximise the profit extracted from that expenditure for favoured government contractors. It's quite an old-fashioned way of running the state to benefit the in-crowd - a long way from the theory of democratic oversight. There's even a story today about fixed penalty notices that has an air of medieval fee-farming about it.
You can have a large percentage of the economy going through the state without that being remotely leftwing (though admittedly some on the left don't seem to realise this).
My daughter's state sixth form college got more Oxbridge offers than Eton this year.
Eton restricts the number of applicants it puts forward. Whether that is or isn't meritocratic is another issue but Oxbridge won't take more than one Etonian per college.
Also increasingly Oxbridge and other top universities demand higher grades from private school pupils
That's because a private school pupil with, say, AAB does worse on average than a state school pupil with AAB. (See, for example, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1339899/ for data in medical school performance.) Private schools provide so much support, they flatter the student's grades, so you need to adjust for that.
Depends which state school, some top grammars or sixth form colleges or free schools get better A level results overall than most private schools
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
You ask for Grey Goose while holding up 3 fingers, obviously...
Might get you one triple.
Correct answer is "three greys goose", which also has absolutely zero chance of being misinterpreted.
The trouble with "flock" is that it might be the wrong collective noun. As any fule kno, geese on the water are a flotilla, and in the air they are a flight. It's only on the ground that they are a flock. So if the bar is on a ship, or a luxury aeroplane, more care will be needed.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
Far less so than the far right, sadly.
(Snip)
I'm far from convinced that's correct. I'd make a firm guess that most of the people going on pro-Palestine/Hamas marches are left-wing, and they've been mobilised very successfully. The one far right march I've encountered (*) was about six men surrounded by dozens of police (*)
(*) Two, if an Orange Order march in Liverpool is 'right' wing. Those guys looked so stern and unhappy I wondered if they'd be happier and more content just being at home in front of the TV...
Okay, the left is willing to march on the streets. But why is that? Because the left has no belief that the institutional powers will react through the democratic means presented - such as voting or talking to your representative (because both major parties agree on the policy solution). Whereas the far right, currently, are being catered to, again, by both political parties (on immigration, on trans rights, on the enforcement of capitalism, etc.). Street fascists are still mobilising, we see that with attacks on hotels and in Dover, but that is typically people who think the already harsh measure brought in to satiate their blood lust are not far enough. And, again, they are still being pandered to with things like the Rwanda bill.
No, I really don't think that's the case.
"Street fascists are still mobilising,"
Yes, we saw them at the pro-HamasPalestinian marches.
Tommy Robinson led a march of hundreds of people this weekend in the Midlands - sure, nowhere near the size of the pro-Palestinian marches, but they still exist. Fascists organise at the Dover border to prevent crossings, and to harass and attack hotels migrants are housed in. We saw a load of fascist thugs march on the Cenotaph only a few months ago, starting brawls with police and bystanders.
Tommeh is an Israel stan now, surely that means it’s impossible for him to be fashy far right?
Nick Griffin is pro Palestine.
You can never tell who the far right hate the most.
Griffin’s positions on Israel are all over the place depending on what he calculated was best for his brand of politics (evidence suggests that he’s not much of a calculator). Naming his pet pigs Anne and Frank was probably the best indicator of his true views.
The organisers of the pro-Israel march went to some lengths to stop Robinson attending.
That the pro-Israel types don't adopt the my enemy's enemy is my friend. It started with you saying how Robinson couldn't be a fascist because he supported Israel and I am explaining to you that if you are saying that is a line adopted by, say, the pro-Israel group, then you are mistaken. As usual.
After replying to the wrong post, explaining why the words you put in my mouth are wrong, excellent.
No bigger bore than a bore on his hobby horse.
2/10 attempt at wriggling out of being caught out.
Another of your old faves. You need a complete revamp of your patter, if you're capable of it at this near atrophied stage.
Let me help you with helping you to understand what you were trying to say.
You posted a picture of Tommy Robinson saying, ironically (ho ho) that it was "impossible for him to be a fascist" and thereby mocking Israel supporters and with the intent of showing how support for Israel could indeed be a fascist position and here was Robinson proving your point.
And I pointed out that this was not a position that supporters of Israel adopted. They didn't want him to attend their events and said he was not welcome, thus giving the lie to your position of Tommy Robinson = Israel supporters = "fashy far right".
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
That might just be the indoctrination from birth about 'knowing your place' etc. You could argue that we do the same now with capitalism - our waking lives are bombarded with adverts for stuff and activities/experiences. We crave both. As a species we create. Ten thousand years ago we didn't create a lot, but we still made beautiful things that people who didn't have might have wanted, be it a ceremonial stone axe, or a necklace or whatever. Now we create devices that can connect you via images and sound to people on the other side of the planet but also fit in your pocket, and of course people want that too.
Some people may be happy with a very limited lot. Arguably most people come to realise that stuff isn't really the answer as the they get older - good friendship and good times is better. But I think wanting things is just part of nature that communists don't seem to understand.
And never forget, in the good old USSR, there used to to be the shop for party officials only. All equal, but some more equal than others.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
But Grey Goose is a brand name and so it would be 3 Grey Gooses just as it is 20 Rothmans not 20 Rothmen.
I was thinking that ‘Gooses’ might be acceptable here.
Can you imagine the stick someone would get if heard ordering ‘3 Grey Geese’?!?!
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
But Grey Goose is a brand name and so it would be 3 Grey Gooses just as it is 20 Rothmans not 20 Rothmen.
I was thinking that ‘Gooses’ might be acceptable here.
Can you imagine the stick someone would get if heard ordering ‘3 Grey Geese’?!?!
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
Any wildfire will have some specific cause that is not spontaneous combustion due to extreme heat - lightning, camping fire, refraction through glass, etc. The effect that high temperatures have is in making everything drier so that the fire can spread more easily and is harder to put out.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
Most migration to the UK is not because of ongoing turmoil. It's student, work and family visas for people from the EU, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and China. We do have some immigration from countries currently undergoing turmoil: most of that is from Ukraine (due to the actions of Russia, not the West) and Hong Kong (due to the actions of China, not the West).
I mean, if your position is stop overseas students coming over, have fun watching the entire university sector collapse as their cash cow disappears. And students should not be considered in the immigration numbers - they come over for a few years and almost all of them go back to their own country (many of them every summer and winter) or get a skilled worker visa (at which point, fine, add them to the numbers). Inflating our immigration numbers to justify anti immigrant sentiment is part of the problem.
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
I haven't had a drink since NYE, this is my fourth time doing Dry January. Since doing it the first time I've found the amount I drink has dropped without any real effort on my part, largely by not drinking in the house and not going to the pub as much. I love alcohol as a social drug but I was never one for nailing a load of cans in front of the TV like mates of mine can do. But even the glass or two of wine or glass of whisky at home has dwindled to virtually nothing. I've found that in my 40s the hangovers are now so bad and long-lasting I just don't go to the pub as much as I used to either. From being 17 to late-30s it was three/four times a week, probably drinking a gallon a time. Now, thanks to using a drink tracking app I started using for my first Dry Jan, I find I average ten days drinking a month, and most of those days are only one or two units. I love a proper sesh in the pub with my mates but it takes me two or three days to get over it. I can cope with the headache, it's the two or three days of lethargy and increasingly bad hangxiety that have curbed by pub visits.
So I have a lot more sober time these past few years. I love it. I read more - and more importantly, remember what I've read. I take longer, more frequent walks, which the dog appreciates. I try and go for a run a few times a week. I play the guitar - badly. I recently got into listening to podcasts. Plus there's always YouTube. I'm also considering whether I want to do a PhD part-time while working, but that way madness may well lie so I blow hot and cold with the notion.
But I'm very rarely bored. Not like you were on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the 80s when I was growing up and there was nothing on TV. That was proper boredom.
I go to bed when I'm tired, usually about 11 but two nights last week it was half 9. If that's boring, so be it - FOMO isn't a thing for me anymore!
I've also cut down on caffeine - I have two builders teas first thing them that's me. As I've hit middle age my body just can't deal with alcohol and caffeine like it did when I was younger. I hit it hard when I was young, I shovelled everything into me I could get my hands on, but I'm glad those days are behind me. I just can't do it now. Nor do I want to.
I wish I could go out on a Friday for a gallon without it wiping out my weekend, but sometimes you just wanna get pissed and talk rubbish with your mates, don't you? So I take the hit and the missus moaning at me for wasting my weekend...
That's a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed getting hammered when I was young, but I prefer a clear head now, and I always manage to keep myself amused.
Re the PhD. If it's on something you love doing then go for it, just choose your supervisors carefully. If you think one might be an arsehole, run a mile.* If you don't really really want to do it (just want everyone to call you Dr ) then just buy one online
If you do a PhD, it will be hell at some point, so you have to really want to do it. Probably more so part time as the hell bit will last longer - it will all last longer - and the "Oh shit I don't have time to get this wrapped up in time" feeling will be even more acute. But the sense of achievement from getting it finished is quite something.
*One of my supervisors was a complete Jeremy Hunt, so that spoiled things a bit. I wasn't sure about him in my interview; should have listened to my instincts. I'd still have done a PhD, just done it somewhere else with different people.
Thanks for that. I spoke to one of my old undergrad tutors before Xmas who's now a Prof and he said they'd be happy to have me back and he'd be happy to supervise, so that's all good. And he'll help me get a proposal together. I just don't know whether I want six years of it with, as you say, extended periods of hell. I am one of the world's greatest procrastinators so I know I would be doing everything last minute. I wrote the last 3000 words of my MA dissertation the day it had to be handed in, so I have form this area. I'm trying to be realistic about my faults!
It's the logistics too - a lot of the archives I'd need to bury myself in are down south and I'm up north.
I have supervised part-time PhDs that have gone well, and others that have not. The most important consideration is probably how much time you can devote to it. Part-time doesn't mean a few hours here and there. Part-time is meant to mean ~15 hours a week (or more). Perhaps the most important skill you need for a PhD is stubbornness. You're the one who has to keep at it all those years.
There are other ways than a part-time PhD of contributing to research. You could consider whether those may fit you better.
Thank you.
I don’t have kids and could go down to a 4 day work week so 15 hours a week isn’t unrealistic at all.
When I spoke to my old tutor before Xmas he mentioned that an MPhil might be a nice way in for me initially, with the option of continuing beyond that if I want to.
Once I decide I want something I am very stubborn and determined and generally get what I want. My problem has always been on deciding what exactly it is I want! I love the idea of doing a PhD. I love being in archives, I enjoy writing. But I am not convinced I want to devote six years to one. So an MPhil is not a bad compromise perhaps.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
Far less so than the far right, sadly.
(Snip)
I'm far from convinced that's correct. I'd make a firm guess that most of the people going on pro-Palestine/Hamas marches are left-wing, and they've been mobilised very successfully. The one far right march I've encountered (*) was about six men surrounded by dozens of police (*)
(*) Two, if an Orange Order march in Liverpool is 'right' wing. Those guys looked so stern and unhappy I wondered if they'd be happier and more content just being at home in front of the TV...
Okay, the left is willing to march on the streets. But why is that? Because the left has no belief that the institutional powers will react through the democratic means presented - such as voting or talking to your representative (because both major parties agree on the policy solution). Whereas the far right, currently, are being catered to, again, by both political parties (on immigration, on trans rights, on the enforcement of capitalism, etc.). Street fascists are still mobilising, we see that with attacks on hotels and in Dover, but that is typically people who think the already harsh measure brought in to satiate their blood lust are not far enough. And, again, they are still being pandered to with things like the Rwanda bill.
The idea that the far right is having its fascistic policies implemented by UK governments on inward migration (record levels), trans rights (moderate policies in place), and compulsory capitalism (the state manages about half of all expenditure in the UK), is nonsense.
On half of all government expenditure, it seems to be that a lot of government expenditure is now managed in such a way as to maximise the profit extracted from that expenditure for favoured government contractors. It's quite an old-fashioned way of running the state to benefit the in-crowd - a long way from the theory of democratic oversight. There's even a story today about fixed penalty notices that has an air of medieval fee-farming about it.
You can have a large percentage of the economy going through the state without that being remotely leftwing (though admittedly some on the left don't seem to realise this).
The Government puts a lot of faith in competitive tendering, but this has produced a set of companies who are very good at winning these processes, but not necessarily that good at delivering on them.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
Far less so than the far right, sadly.
(Snip)
I'm far from convinced that's correct. I'd make a firm guess that most of the people going on pro-Palestine/Hamas marches are left-wing, and they've been mobilised very successfully. The one far right march I've encountered (*) was about six men surrounded by dozens of police (*)
(*) Two, if an Orange Order march in Liverpool is 'right' wing. Those guys looked so stern and unhappy I wondered if they'd be happier and more content just being at home in front of the TV...
Okay, the left is willing to march on the streets. But why is that? Because the left has no belief that the institutional powers will react through the democratic means presented - such as voting or talking to your representative (because both major parties agree on the policy solution). Whereas the far right, currently, are being catered to, again, by both political parties (on immigration, on trans rights, on the enforcement of capitalism, etc.). Street fascists are still mobilising, we see that with attacks on hotels and in Dover, but that is typically people who think the already harsh measure brought in to satiate their blood lust are not far enough. And, again, they are still being pandered to with things like the Rwanda bill.
No, I really don't think that's the case.
"Street fascists are still mobilising,"
Yes, we saw them at the pro-HamasPalestinian marches.
Tommy Robinson led a march of hundreds of people this weekend in the Midlands - sure, nowhere near the size of the pro-Palestinian marches, but they still exist. Fascists organise at the Dover border to prevent crossings, and to harass and attack hotels migrants are housed in. We saw a load of fascist thugs march on the Cenotaph only a few months ago, starting brawls with police and bystanders.
Tommeh is an Israel stan now, surely that means it’s impossible for him to be fashy far right?
Nick Griffin is pro Palestine.
You can never tell who the far right hate the most.
Griffin’s positions on Israel are all over the place depending on what he calculated was best for his brand of politics (evidence suggests that he’s not much of a calculator). Naming his pet pigs Anne and Frank was probably the best indicator of his true views.
The organisers of the pro-Israel march went to some lengths to stop Robinson attending.
That the pro-Israel types don't adopt the my enemy's enemy is my friend. It started with you saying how Robinson couldn't be a fascist because he supported Israel and I am explaining to you that if you are saying that is a line adopted by, say, the pro-Israel group, then you are mistaken. As usual.
After replying to the wrong post, explaining why the words you put in my mouth are wrong, excellent.
No bigger bore than a bore on his hobby horse.
2/10 attempt at wriggling out of being caught out.
Another of your old faves. You need a complete revamp of your patter, if you're capable of it at this near atrophied stage.
Let me help you with helping you to understand what you were trying to say.
You posted a picture of Tommy Robinson saying, ironically (ho ho) that it was "impossible for him to be a fascist" and thereby mocking Israel supporters and with the intent of showing how support for Israel could indeed be a fascist position and here was Robinson proving your point.
And I pointed out that this was not a position that supporters of Israel adopted. They didn't want him to attend their events and said he was not welcome, thus giving the lie to your position of Tommy Robinson = Israel supporters = "fashy far right".
You are most welcome.
I knew you were a 5th form debating society duffer when you stated that Israel is defined as a Jewish state ergo any criticism of Israel was a criticism of Jews. All your (endless) posts on the subject since then have only added to this knowledge.
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
Most migration to the UK is not because of ongoing turmoil. It's student, work and family visas for people from the EU, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and China. We do have some immigration from countries currently undergoing turmoil: most of that is from Ukraine (due to the actions of Russia, not the West) and Hong Kong (due to the actions of China, not the West).
I mean, if your position is stop overseas students coming over, have fun watching the entire university sector collapse as their cash cow disappears. And students should not be considered in the immigration numbers - they come over for a few years and almost all of them go back to their own country (many of them every summer and winter) or get a skilled worker visa (at which point, fine, add them to the numbers). Inflating our immigration numbers to justify anti immigrant sentiment is part of the problem.
It would be a good thing if a significant part of the university sector disappeared. Both staff and students in many institutions could be more usefully employed in other parts of the economy.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
But Grey Goose is a brand name and so it would be 3 Grey Gooses just as it is 20 Rothmans not 20 Rothmen.
I was thinking that ‘Gooses’ might be acceptable here.
Can you imagine the stick someone would get if heard ordering ‘3 Grey Geese’?!?!
Any wildfire will have some specific cause that is not spontaneous combustion due to extreme heat - lightning, camping fire, refraction through glass, etc. The effect that high temperatures have is in making everything drier so that the fire can spread more easily and is harder to put out.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
A lot to do with Foehn effect and a warm damp airmass with winds from the south. Yes there is something going - climate change has led to warmer background temps, and possibly shifted weather patterns (e.g. the jet stream being more inclined to be north of the UK rather than south and thus the decline of truly cold. but zonal, winters (zonal being a term in the weather geek world for a persistent west to east moving circulation, often characterised by rinse and repeat weather systems coming through).
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
Far less so than the far right, sadly.
(Snip)
I'm far from convinced that's correct. I'd make a firm guess that most of the people going on pro-Palestine/Hamas marches are left-wing, and they've been mobilised very successfully. The one far right march I've encountered (*) was about six men surrounded by dozens of police (*)
(*) Two, if an Orange Order march in Liverpool is 'right' wing. Those guys looked so stern and unhappy I wondered if they'd be happier and more content just being at home in front of the TV...
Okay, the left is willing to march on the streets. But why is that? Because the left has no belief that the institutional powers will react through the democratic means presented - such as voting or talking to your representative (because both major parties agree on the policy solution). Whereas the far right, currently, are being catered to, again, by both political parties (on immigration, on trans rights, on the enforcement of capitalism, etc.). Street fascists are still mobilising, we see that with attacks on hotels and in Dover, but that is typically people who think the already harsh measure brought in to satiate their blood lust are not far enough. And, again, they are still being pandered to with things like the Rwanda bill.
No, I really don't think that's the case.
"Street fascists are still mobilising,"
Yes, we saw them at the pro-HamasPalestinian marches.
Tommy Robinson led a march of hundreds of people this weekend in the Midlands - sure, nowhere near the size of the pro-Palestinian marches, but they still exist. Fascists organise at the Dover border to prevent crossings, and to harass and attack hotels migrants are housed in. We saw a load of fascist thugs march on the Cenotaph only a few months ago, starting brawls with police and bystanders.
Tommeh is an Israel stan now, surely that means it’s impossible for him to be fashy far right?
Nick Griffin is pro Palestine.
You can never tell who the far right hate the most.
Griffin’s positions on Israel are all over the place depending on what he calculated was best for his brand of politics (evidence suggests that he’s not much of a calculator). Naming his pet pigs Anne and Frank was probably the best indicator of his true views.
The organisers of the pro-Israel march went to some lengths to stop Robinson attending.
That the pro-Israel types don't adopt the my enemy's enemy is my friend. It started with you saying how Robinson couldn't be a fascist because he supported Israel and I am explaining to you that if you are saying that is a line adopted by, say, the pro-Israel group, then you are mistaken. As usual.
After replying to the wrong post, explaining why the words you put in my mouth are wrong, excellent.
No bigger bore than a bore on his hobby horse.
2/10 attempt at wriggling out of being caught out.
Another of your old faves. You need a complete revamp of your patter, if you're capable of it at this near atrophied stage.
Let me help you with helping you to understand what you were trying to say.
You posted a picture of Tommy Robinson saying, ironically (ho ho) that it was "impossible for him to be a fascist" and thereby mocking Israel supporters and with the intent of showing how support for Israel could indeed be a fascist position and here was Robinson proving your point.
And I pointed out that this was not a position that supporters of Israel adopted. They didn't want him to attend their events and said he was not welcome, thus giving the lie to your position of Tommy Robinson = Israel supporters = "fashy far right".
You are most welcome.
I knew you were a 5th form debating society duffer when you stated that Israel is defined as a Jewish state ergo any criticism of Israel was a criticism of Jews. All your (endless) posts on the subject since then have only added to this knowledge.
More diverting.
My explanation of your post was exactly right and you know it hence your blathering.
Any wildfire will have some specific cause that is not spontaneous combustion due to extreme heat - lightning, camping fire, refraction through glass, etc. The effect that high temperatures have is in making everything drier so that the fire can spread more easily and is harder to put out.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
Yes. I’m worried about global warming don’t get me wrong, but a couple of days of 19c isn’t going to dry the grass out to that extent is it?
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
"I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please" is also highly ambiguous (at least the second in the red light district bars in Essex)
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
Most migration to the UK is not because of ongoing turmoil. It's student, work and family visas for people from the EU, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and China. We do have some immigration from countries currently undergoing turmoil: most of that is from Ukraine (due to the actions of Russia, not the West) and Hong Kong (due to the actions of China, not the West).
I mean, if your position is stop overseas students coming over, have fun watching the entire university sector collapse as their cash cow disappears. And students should not be considered in the immigration numbers - they come over for a few years and almost all of them go back to their own country (many of them every summer and winter) or get a skilled worker visa (at which point, fine, add them to the numbers). Inflating our immigration numbers to justify anti immigrant sentiment is part of the problem.
I’m all for overseas students. They pay (a portion of) my salary.
If we leave out student visas, the point still stands. UK migration is much more work and family visas than it is about refugees, and the refugees are not all fleeing countries undergoing turmoil due to the actions of the West. In other words, what you said was wrong.
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
Most migration to the UK is not because of ongoing turmoil. It's student, work and family visas for people from the EU, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and China. We do have some immigration from countries currently undergoing turmoil: most of that is from Ukraine (due to the actions of Russia, not the West) and Hong Kong (due to the actions of China, not the West).
I mean, if your position is stop overseas students coming over, have fun watching the entire university sector collapse as their cash cow disappears. And students should not be considered in the immigration numbers - they come over for a few years and almost all of them go back to their own country (many of them every summer and winter) or get a skilled worker visa (at which point, fine, add them to the numbers). Inflating our immigration numbers to justify anti immigrant sentiment is part of the problem.
It would be a good thing if a significant part of the university sector disappeared. Both staff and students in many institutions could be more usefully employed in other parts of the economy.
What was someone saying about hundreds of years of wisdom being under threat from the woke left? Coz I don’t think william is of the woke left.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
If we remove "shots of" I think it becomes less clear. "I want 3 Grey Geese" or "I want 3 Grey Goose"? Normal usage probably makes it plural - analogous to "I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please".
"I want 3 Stellas" or "2 Chardonnays please" is also highly ambiguous (at least the second in the red light district bars in Essex)
Chardonnays maybe. Stellas surely more of a Chelsea red light district bar phenomenon.
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
This is indeed the main challenge with reducing one's drinking. I have the same problem.
Yep
Iam lucky that I do creative work that I really enjoy, as a job - so I can expand that generally, and it pays, of course
Still leaves quite a few hours spare, however
I just don't get "hobbies" - don't grasp the idea. Or maybe my hobbies are simply things I can't do sitting around at home - travel, exploring, etc
I do like cooking, and following quite technical recipes (is that a "hobby"?); but I am still in weight loss/regular fasting mode, so even that is off the list, for now
EEEEK. I shall eat half a smuggled gummy bear
You have to learn to embrace boredom for a certain amount of time. Fishing, golf, and Buddhist meditation are all about that.
A wise statement
Boredom is something I have struggled with all my life....
When you post about AI, lab leaks and UFOs we share your pain.
'Michael Mason, who has a weakened prostate, was handed a fine after he stopped at a layby on the A41 near Kings Langley to take what he described as a “discreet” wee, BBC News reported last month. Then, later in December, another man, who has asked not to be named, was caught out in similar circumstances at a layby in the area.
In both cases, the men were stopped by an employee of District Enforcement, which despite its official-sounding name is a private company contracted by Dacorum council to issue penalty fines. The council receives 22% of the fines and the company retains 78%.
The second recipient had his fine rescinded after arguing to the council that its enforcers had not seen him urinating. His uncle complained to Dacorum council, arguing that urinating in the countryside – or indeed anywhere – could not constitute littering.'
I'm left with two unanswered thoughts - if someone came on at me and wanted to watch me when I was having a piddle on my own in the countryside, I'd be reporting him to the polis for indecency etc. And don't Dacorum provide public conveniences? Or is this a scheme to save money by not providing them, and then make (a little bit of) the profit from not doing so?
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
What are you on? The ownership of people is a state dynamic; it is the state that guarantees property rights and their relationships via contracts. And the way anarchist societies function is through mass democratic participation. Look at the history of anarchist Spain, the collectivisation of farming and the redistribution of housing. That wasn't an abject failure economically (and they even managed to hold up militarily for a while - the Spanish civil war could have gone the right way if the USSR didn't force payment for weapons up front (unlike the fascists who armed Franco on credit), if the "liberal" powers were willing to intervene on the side of the left, and if the Stalinists in the Marxist wing of the coalition didn't force out the women who fought on the front lines).
And Rojava have methods of dealing with antisocial behaviour - communally. This method was highly effective at dealing with a big issue at the beginning of the Rojavan revolution - blood feuds and honour killings. Families had blood feuds and were killing each other in a cycle of violence. The community elected that the "grandmothers", a group of about half a dozen elder women, should do mediation between the feuding families. These grandmothers would listen to the grievances and talk about what each side would accept as reparations for their grievance, and then negotiated these between the families and with the community. This was then solidified through a big dinner - a culturally significant event that essentially expresses friendship and a return to normal relations between people.
Capitalism has isolated and atomised people - Thatcher has got her wish after saying "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family unit". As community ties have broken down, of course it is difficult to imagine community solutions to such issues as antisocial behaviour. But, interestingly, we see the human impulse for such things all the time - when Covid broke out people spontaneously set up mutual aid systems between neighbours who could and couldn't leave the house, etc. The state then decided to take this over and added bureaucracy to it, both to essentially means test the support, but also (unconsciously, I would argue) to keep their monopoly on human intervention and support and prevent people realising that mutual aid is really easy and simple and doesn't need the state to happen.
Any wildfire will have some specific cause that is not spontaneous combustion due to extreme heat - lightning, camping fire, refraction through glass, etc. The effect that high temperatures have is in making everything drier so that the fire can spread more easily and is harder to put out.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
Yes. I’m worried about global warming don’t get me wrong, but a couple of days of 19c isn’t going to dry the grass out to that extent is it?
Indeed. Actually the specific synoptic and meso-climate features of the day and the weeks leading up will have been more important. It's been fairly dry for a good few days in that area, but on the 19.6C day Kinlochewe was under a Foehn effect where moist mild air rains out (or is simply trapped at low level) on the windward side of mountains and then very dry upper air descends on the leeward side at warms adiabatically. I've not looked at the station humidity stats for the day but I'd expect the warm temperature was combined with a killer combination of very low relative humidity and gusty wind.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
What are you on? The ownership of people is a state dynamic; it is the state that guarantees property rights and their relationships via contracts. And the way anarchist societies function is through mass democratic participation. Look at the history of anarchist Spain, the collectivisation of farming and the redistribution of housing. That wasn't an abject failure economically (and they even managed to hold up militarily for a while - the Spanish civil war could have gone the right way if the USSR didn't force payment for weapons up front (unlike the fascists who armed Franco on credit), if the "liberal" powers were willing to intervene on the side of the left, and if the Stalinists in the Marxist wing of the coalition didn't force out the women who fought on the front lines).
And Rojava have methods of dealing with antisocial behaviour - communally. This method was highly effective at dealing with a big issue at the beginning of the Rojavan revolution - blood feuds and honour killings. Families had blood feuds and were killing each other in a cycle of violence. The community elected that the "grandmothers", a group of about half a dozen elder women, should do mediation between the feuding families. These grandmothers would listen to the grievances and talk about what each side would accept as reparations for their grievance, and then negotiated these between the families and with the community. This was then solidified through a big dinner - a culturally significant event that essentially expresses friendship and a return to normal relations between people.
Capitalism has isolated and atomised people - Thatcher has got her wish after saying "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family unit". As community ties have broken down, of course it is difficult to imagine community solutions to such issues as antisocial behaviour. But, interestingly, we see the human impulse for such things all the time - when Covid broke out people spontaneously set up mutual aid systems between neighbours who could and couldn't leave the house, etc. The state then decided to take this over and added bureaucracy to it, both to essentially means test the support, but also (unconsciously, I would argue) to keep their monopoly on human intervention and support and prevent people realising that mutual aid is really easy and simple and doesn't need the state to happen.
You are a Thatcherite yourself. When she said "there is no such thing as society" she meant that it is just an abstraction and only exists in concrete terms in the form of individual people and their mutual obligations to each other. When you say you dislike the idea of states, you are grasping for the same point.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
My daughter's state sixth form college got more Oxbridge offers than Eton this year.
Eton restricts the number of applicants it puts forward. Whether that is or isn't meritocratic is another issue but Oxbridge won't take more than one Etonian per college.
Also increasingly Oxbridge and other top universities demand higher grades from private school pupils
I was chatting to a fellow at my old college. They have stats that show as they recruit more from the maintained sector based on assessed potential rather than flat exam results, they get better degree results at the other end. They are up to 75% of home students from the maintained sector this year.
With the same A level results maybe, hardly surprising as you have to work harder to get those A levels from an average comp than a top independent school.
However, overall ' ..73 per cent of state school graduates gained a first or upper second class degree compared with 82 per cent of independent school graduates'
True enough - lots of reasons for that across the board. This is more what happens *right at the top end* when you recruit for potential in the wider cohort.
Of course, the private sector may well have to respond to this (unless their sales pitch changes).
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
What are you on? The ownership of people is a state dynamic; it is the state that guarantees property rights and their relationships via contracts. And the way anarchist societies function is through mass democratic participation. Look at the history of anarchist Spain, the collectivisation of farming and the redistribution of housing. That wasn't an abject failure economically (and they even managed to hold up militarily for a while - the Spanish civil war could have gone the right way if the USSR didn't force payment for weapons up front (unlike the fascists who armed Franco on credit), if the "liberal" powers were willing to intervene on the side of the left, and if the Stalinists in the Marxist wing of the coalition didn't force out the women who fought on the front lines).
And Rojava have methods of dealing with antisocial behaviour - communally. This method was highly effective at dealing with a big issue at the beginning of the Rojavan revolution - blood feuds and honour killings. Families had blood feuds and were killing each other in a cycle of violence. The community elected that the "grandmothers", a group of about half a dozen elder women, should do mediation between the feuding families. These grandmothers would listen to the grievances and talk about what each side would accept as reparations for their grievance, and then negotiated these between the families and with the community. This was then solidified through a big dinner - a culturally significant event that essentially expresses friendship and a return to normal relations between people.
Capitalism has isolated and atomised people - Thatcher has got her wish after saying "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family unit". As community ties have broken down, of course it is difficult to imagine community solutions to such issues as antisocial behaviour. But, interestingly, we see the human impulse for such things all the time - when Covid broke out people spontaneously set up mutual aid systems between neighbours who could and couldn't leave the house, etc. The state then decided to take this over and added bureaucracy to it, both to essentially means test the support, but also (unconsciously, I would argue) to keep their monopoly on human intervention and support and prevent people realising that mutual aid is really easy and simple and doesn't need the state to happen.
That is to misinterpret Thatcher. The point is that 'society' doesn't exist - it is a construct of the actions of all the people. So 'society' doesn't donate to a food bank, lots of people do when they do their weekly shop and add in a couple of items to drop off.
I think you live a dream world if you think mankind would ever welcome an anarchist state.
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
Most migration to the UK is not because of ongoing turmoil. It's student, work and family visas for people from the EU, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and China. We do have some immigration from countries currently undergoing turmoil: most of that is from Ukraine (due to the actions of Russia, not the West) and Hong Kong (due to the actions of China, not the West).
I mean, if your position is stop overseas students coming over, have fun watching the entire university sector collapse as their cash cow disappears. And students should not be considered in the immigration numbers - they come over for a few years and almost all of them go back to their own country (many of them every summer and winter) or get a skilled worker visa (at which point, fine, add them to the numbers). Inflating our immigration numbers to justify anti immigrant sentiment is part of the problem.
It would be a good thing if a significant part of the university sector disappeared. Both staff and students in many institutions could be more usefully employed in other parts of the economy.
What was someone saying about hundreds of years of wisdom being under threat from the woke left? Coz I don’t think william is of the woke left.
Universities don't have a monopoly on issuing credentials, let alone on delivering education. The expansion of the sector in an era of ubiquitous communication and information is a false economy.
In fact many universities are engaged in a form of asset stripping, selling overpriced degrees to foreigners to exploit the residual brand value of a British education, while actively devaluing it.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
I haven't had a drink since NYE, this is my fourth time doing Dry January. Since doing it the first time I've found the amount I drink has dropped without any real effort on my part, largely by not drinking in the house and not going to the pub as much. I love alcohol as a social drug but I was never one for nailing a load of cans in front of the TV like mates of mine can do. But even the glass or two of wine or glass of whisky at home has dwindled to virtually nothing. I've found that in my 40s the hangovers are now so bad and long-lasting I just don't go to the pub as much as I used to either. From being 17 to late-30s it was three/four times a week, probably drinking a gallon a time. Now, thanks to using a drink tracking app I started using for my first Dry Jan, I find I average ten days drinking a month, and most of those days are only one or two units. I love a proper sesh in the pub with my mates but it takes me two or three days to get over it. I can cope with the headache, it's the two or three days of lethargy and increasingly bad hangxiety that have curbed by pub visits.
So I have a lot more sober time these past few years. I love it. I read more - and more importantly, remember what I've read. I take longer, more frequent walks, which the dog appreciates. I try and go for a run a few times a week. I play the guitar - badly. I recently got into listening to podcasts. Plus there's always YouTube. I'm also considering whether I want to do a PhD part-time while working, but that way madness may well lie so I blow hot and cold with the notion.
But I'm very rarely bored. Not like you were on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the 80s when I was growing up and there was nothing on TV. That was proper boredom.
I go to bed when I'm tired, usually about 11 but two nights last week it was half 9. If that's boring, so be it - FOMO isn't a thing for me anymore!
I've also cut down on caffeine - I have two builders teas first thing them that's me. As I've hit middle age my body just can't deal with alcohol and caffeine like it did when I was younger. I hit it hard when I was young, I shovelled everything into me I could get my hands on, but I'm glad those days are behind me. I just can't do it now. Nor do I want to.
I wish I could go out on a Friday for a gallon without it wiping out my weekend, but sometimes you just wanna get pissed and talk rubbish with your mates, don't you? So I take the hit and the missus moaning at me for wasting my weekend...
That's a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed getting hammered when I was young, but I prefer a clear head now, and I always manage to keep myself amused.
Re the PhD. If it's on something you love doing then go for it, just choose your supervisors carefully. If you think one might be an arsehole, run a mile.* If you don't really really want to do it (just want everyone to call you Dr ) then just buy one online
If you do a PhD, it will be hell at some point, so you have to really want to do it. Probably more so part time as the hell bit will last longer - it will all last longer - and the "Oh shit I don't have time to get this wrapped up in time" feeling will be even more acute. But the sense of achievement from getting it finished is quite something.
*One of my supervisors was a complete Jeremy Hunt, so that spoiled things a bit. I wasn't sure about him in my interview; should have listened to my instincts. I'd still have done a PhD, just done it somewhere else with different people.
Thanks for that. I spoke to one of my old undergrad tutors before Xmas who's now a Prof and he said they'd be happy to have me back and he'd be happy to supervise, so that's all good. And he'll help me get a proposal together. I just don't know whether I want six years of it with, as you say, extended periods of hell. I am one of the world's greatest procrastinators so I know I would be doing everything last minute. I wrote the last 3000 words of my MA dissertation the day it had to be handed in, so I have form this area. I'm trying to be realistic about my faults!
It's the logistics too - a lot of the archives I'd need to bury myself in are down south and I'm up north.
I have supervised part-time PhDs that have gone well, and others that have not. The most important consideration is probably how much time you can devote to it. Part-time doesn't mean a few hours here and there. Part-time is meant to mean ~15 hours a week (or more). Perhaps the most important skill you need for a PhD is stubbornness. You're the one who has to keep at it all those years.
There are other ways than a part-time PhD of contributing to research. You could consider whether those may fit you better.
Thank you.
I don’t have kids and could go down to a 4 day work week so 15 hours a week isn’t unrealistic at all.
When I spoke to my old tutor before Xmas he mentioned that an MPhil might be a nice way in for me initially, with the option of continuing beyond that if I want to.
Once I decide I want something I am very stubborn and determined and generally get what I want. My problem has always been on deciding what exactly it is I want! I love the idea of doing a PhD. I love being in archives, I enjoy writing. But I am not convinced I want to devote six years to one. So an MPhil is not a bad compromise perhaps.
When I did my PhD we were formally registered on to an MPhil and then 'upgraded' at some point after the first year to the PhD registration. There was an option for those fed up/underperforming to leave with an MPhil. Might be something worth discussing, particularly if you could design a study where, say, you could focus the first two years on something that would be worth an MPhil but could also be incorporated into a PhD (and for the first two years of six) and still tell a coherent story.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
Many fewer people killed directly by the State under the Tsars than under Stalin.
You'll probably cover the purges when you do the A level, next year.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
4) Three greys Goose, please milady
is the most elegant construction.
I find “three gin and tonics” to be less elegant than the incorrect “three gins and tonic”.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
Standards improved apart form the ones who got shot?
How many died in the USSR from 1917 to 1989 at the hands of the state? How many starved to death in Stalin's famine in Ukraine? How many did Mao kill with his ludicrous plans?
How anyone can bring such examples to the table as 'improving on what had gone before' is beyond belief.
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
This is indeed the main challenge with reducing one's drinking. I have the same problem.
Yep
Iam lucky that I do creative work that I really enjoy, as a job - so I can expand that generally, and it pays, of course
Still leaves quite a few hours spare, however
I just don't get "hobbies" - don't grasp the idea. Or maybe my hobbies are simply things I can't do sitting around at home - travel, exploring, etc
I do like cooking, and following quite technical recipes (is that a "hobby"?); but I am still in weight loss/regular fasting mode, so even that is off the list, for now
EEEEK. I shall eat half a smuggled gummy bear
You have to learn to embrace boredom for a certain amount of time. Fishing, golf, and Buddhist meditation are all about that.
Oi that's 2 of my pass-times there (not the fishing).
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
Much easier to forgive. If you’re going to dilute your drink with crap flavoured sugar water, then just choose the cheapest one in the first place!
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Number one would be correct. 'Grey Goose' is a mass term (as opposed to a count noun) so shouldn't really be pluralized. In the same way you shouldn't say 'I want three glasses of wines' but 'I want three glasses of wine'.
4) Three greys Goose, please milady
is the most elegant construction.
5) Geese grey, thrice
is archaic although preferred in some schools.
Trois oies grises would of course be the original French and a bit of a tongue twister. Trois oies du Roi even better.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
The environment doesn't care whether the factory is owned by a capitalist, or owned by the state, or owned by the workers. Blaming climate change on "capitalist organisation" isn't serious.
You say you want to reverse what you call neoliberalism but in reality you would be horrified by the idea, because it would mean less immigration and a more rigid labour market.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
Much easier to forgive. If you’re going to dilute your drink with crap flavoured sugar water, then just choose the cheapest one in the first place!
In my mate's restaurant, it was quite common for well heeled guests from China to order a bottle of aged Bordeaux and mix it with Coke (of the cola variety).
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
Much easier to forgive. If you’re going to dilute your drink with crap flavoured sugar water, then just choose the cheapest one in the first place!
In my mate's restaurant, it was quite common for well heeled guests from China to order a bottle of aged Bordeaux and mix it with Coke (of the cola variety).
Yes, it’s very much a “New Money” phenomenon, where people know what they are *supposed* to be drinking, for whatever cultural or social reason, but either just don’t like those drinks too much, or got used to adding mixers to the cheap crap and think that’s how it’s done irrespective of the quality.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
That might just be the indoctrination from birth about 'knowing your place' etc. You could argue that we do the same now with capitalism - our waking lives are bombarded with adverts for stuff and activities/experiences. We crave both. As a species we create. Ten thousand years ago we didn't create a lot, but we still made beautiful things that people who didn't have might have wanted, be it a ceremonial stone axe, or a necklace or whatever. Now we create devices that can connect you via images and sound to people on the other side of the planet but also fit in your pocket, and of course people want that too.
Some people may be happy with a very limited lot. Arguably most people come to realise that stuff isn't really the answer as the they get older - good friendship and good times is better. But I think wanting things is just part of nature that communists don't seem to understand.
And never forget, in the good old USSR, there used to to be the shop for party officials only. All equal, but some more equal than others.
Communism is not the only possible alternative. And, generally, people who want to overthrow the current system do so because they want stuff to be better distributed, so that those currently going without have, er, more stuff. So I think we do understand the desire for stuff quite a bit, actually.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
Much easier to forgive. If you’re going to dilute your drink with crap flavoured sugar water, then just choose the cheapest one in the first place!
I was thinking more of the powdered form! And not mixed with the drink.
Although after ingesting cocaine, maybe one can't tell the quality of a spirit anyway?* So it's just as bad as mixing it - with Coke or 'coke'.
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
Three Grey Geese, large ones please.
Honking big measures.
And don’t even think about putting mixers in the premium spirits.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please ).
Sure it was Coke rather than coke? I'd find the latter easier to forgive, I think.
Much easier to forgive. If you’re going to dilute your drink with crap flavoured sugar water, then just choose the cheapest one in the first place!
In my mate's restaurant, it was quite common for well heeled guests from China to order a bottle of aged Bordeaux and mix it with Coke (of the cola variety).
Yes, it’s very much a “New Money” phenomenon, where people know what they are *supposed* to be drinking, for whatever cultural or social reason, but either just don’t like those drinks too much, or got used to adding mixers to the cheap crap and think that’s how it’s done irrespective of the quality.
An acquaintance of mine asked, on a Guinness brewery tour, to have his 'free' pint of Guinness mixed with blackcurrant squash. The bartender dealt with it admirably and obliged. Maybe a common request.
Every single academic conference I go to is doom laden. There is deep deep worry in the academic community about where current trends are taking us....
So I teach on the MBA programme at a leading London business school. We visited a leading european car manufacurer this year... they had electrified one of their brands and sold thousand of cars they could not deliver... they had taken the money, but the copper, lithium, rare minerals and quality steel was in such short supply that it led to a crisis for the company. Anyway they were open about this. After I spoke to one of the top top execs of this firm and said: look out on the streets at the fleet of vehicles driving around. What is the likelihood of those being replaced 1:1 with electric or hydrogen by 2040 or 2050..... he said: "Nil... it isn't happening... mobility as we have known it since ww2 is going to become a luxury." I asked him what should be done.... he said "we have to redesign cities so the car isn't needed like today" 🤷
The consumption opportunities and level of material prosperity people have become accustomed to over the last 80 years is an aberration historical terms and it is about to drop away.
I am no sort of leftist, but if we look back eg 25 years to 1999, we were not exactly living on gruel and sending our children to school shoeless in the snow.
What the world needs is not for the rich world to get disproportionately richer, it is for the poorer world to catch up with the middling/richer world. The is essential not only because it is right, but also because there is no other way to stem the increasing flow of economic and political migrants.
The flow of migrants could be stemmed very easily if there were the political will to do it. You don't have to remake the world.
How? Short of state rebuilding and peacemaking in the countries currently undergoing turmoil (which are typically in turmoil due to the actions or incentives of the West) what can we do to reduce the number of migrants coming here?
We are having a very productive day at work, and as the resident Grammar Nazi I have been dragged into this debate.
You’re at a bar and you want to order 3 Grey Goose drinks, do you tell the bar staff
1) I want three shots of Grey Goose
2) I want three shots of Grey Geese
3) I want a flock of Vodka
You ask for Grey Goose while holding up 3 fingers, obviously...
Might get you one triple.
Correct answer is "three greys goose", which also has absolutely zero chance of being misinterpreted.
But you wouldn't order "three Johnnies Walker", would you?
Me, I'd say "three grey gooses".
Rationale: The drink is sufficiently removed from what it's named after to allow you to play fast and loose and just choose what sounds best - which is the above.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
So apart from the murders, the famines, the closed borders (to stop people leaving), the rationing, the extreme poverty (for all but a very small social elite who lived like Henry VIII), Soviet Russia was awesome?
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
This is indeed the main challenge with reducing one's drinking. I have the same problem.
Yep
Iam lucky that I do creative work that I really enjoy, as a job - so I can expand that generally, and it pays, of course
Still leaves quite a few hours spare, however
I just don't get "hobbies" - don't grasp the idea. Or maybe my hobbies are simply things I can't do sitting around at home - travel, exploring, etc
I do like cooking, and following quite technical recipes (is that a "hobby"?); but I am still in weight loss/regular fasting mode, so even that is off the list, for now
EEEEK. I shall eat half a smuggled gummy bear
You have to learn to embrace boredom for a certain amount of time. Fishing, golf, and Buddhist meditation are all about that.
A wise statement
Boredom is something I have struggled with all my life....
Could try a PhD. Always something to do. Plenty of opportunities for boredom if you choose the wrong topic
Golly. Thank goodness I'm a forgiving soul else I could take being called a paedophile by a PBer in his late night cups to the bank. But that was in another country (the past), and besides, that username is dead.
Any wildfire will have some specific cause that is not spontaneous combustion due to extreme heat - lightning, camping fire, refraction through glass, etc. The effect that high temperatures have is in making everything drier so that the fire can spread more easily and is harder to put out.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
A lot to do with Foehn effect and a warm damp airmass with winds from the south. Yes there is something going - climate change has led to warmer background temps, and possibly shifted weather patterns (e.g. the jet stream being more inclined to be north of the UK rather than south and thus the decline of truly cold. but zonal, winters (zonal being a term in the weather geek world for a persistent west to east moving circulation, often characterised by rinse and repeat weather systems coming through).
Yes. Just as a 13% score for Reform is definitely an outlier, combined with a methodological effect from a particular polling firm, but, nevertheless, you wouldn't see it at all unless there was something of substance happening in the electorate.
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
I haven't had a drink since NYE, this is my fourth time doing Dry January. Since doing it the first time I've found the amount I drink has dropped without any real effort on my part, largely by not drinking in the house and not going to the pub as much. I love alcohol as a social drug but I was never one for nailing a load of cans in front of the TV like mates of mine can do. But even the glass or two of wine or glass of whisky at home has dwindled to virtually nothing. I've found that in my 40s the hangovers are now so bad and long-lasting I just don't go to the pub as much as I used to either. From being 17 to late-30s it was three/four times a week, probably drinking a gallon a time. Now, thanks to using a drink tracking app I started using for my first Dry Jan, I find I average ten days drinking a month, and most of those days are only one or two units. I love a proper sesh in the pub with my mates but it takes me two or three days to get over it. I can cope with the headache, it's the two or three days of lethargy and increasingly bad hangxiety that have curbed by pub visits.
So I have a lot more sober time these past few years. I love it. I read more - and more importantly, remember what I've read. I take longer, more frequent walks, which the dog appreciates. I try and go for a run a few times a week. I play the guitar - badly. I recently got into listening to podcasts. Plus there's always YouTube. I'm also considering whether I want to do a PhD part-time while working, but that way madness may well lie so I blow hot and cold with the notion.
But I'm very rarely bored. Not like you were on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the 80s when I was growing up and there was nothing on TV. That was proper boredom.
I go to bed when I'm tired, usually about 11 but two nights last week it was half 9. If that's boring, so be it - FOMO isn't a thing for me anymore!
I've also cut down on caffeine - I have two builders teas first thing them that's me. As I've hit middle age my body just can't deal with alcohol and caffeine like it did when I was younger. I hit it hard when I was young, I shovelled everything into me I could get my hands on, but I'm glad those days are behind me. I just can't do it now. Nor do I want to.
I wish I could go out on a Friday for a gallon without it wiping out my weekend, but sometimes you just wanna get pissed and talk rubbish with your mates, don't you? So I take the hit and the missus moaning at me for wasting my weekend...
That's a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed getting hammered when I was young, but I prefer a clear head now, and I always manage to keep myself amused.
I water down every alcoholic drink I have now, which means I never get to the hangover stage. My theory was that you never beat the two or three pint buzz, and any more after that was just giving you worse hangovers without making the night better. Now I can’t drink alcohol that’s not watered down, albeit I do probably drink too often
I think that's spot on, and I find the lack of lower alcohol, but still tasty, beer incredibly annoying. I'd like to have one pint of 4% beer, and follow it by 2% ones. That would mean my body is processing the alcohol at roughly the same rate I'm drinking, and it won't feel like cheating. It would obviously almost halve how much beer I drank out on a curry night with my mates too.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
The environment doesn't care whether the factory is owned by a capitalist, or owned by the state, or owned by the workers. Blaming climate change on "capitalist organisation" isn't serious.
You say you want to reverse what you call neoliberalism but in reality you would be horrified by the idea, because it would mean less immigration and a more rigid labour market.
No - ending neoliberalism would not automatically mean less immigration - again, if it was done in an anarchist manner it would mean dissolution of states. If you were to dissolve neoliberalism and replace it with fascism, sure!
I would argue that workers would be less likely to destroy the world - of course. The reasoning is simple - the accumulation of wealth damages your ability to empathise and your incentives to work with society (because you believe you have the leverage to act in away to secure yourself without needing society). Workers, collectively, make up society in a way that the capitalist who owns the means of production just don't. In the same way a worker collective would not vote to offshore their own jobs (because they are not incentivised to maximise profit for shareholders and discipline labour by going to regimes with laxer labour regulations) they would not vote for the destruction of the planet.
When GM and Ford were told about the science of climate change in the 60s, they didn't care because short term profits were more important than the continued survival of the world, and in that time invested in embedding fossil fuels into the world economy and funding a right wing reaction to the scientific reality (very similar to how smoking was known to kill and money was spent on PR and research to obscure this). I trust that if workers were in the position of power at that point, they would have made the right decision. We can't roll back time and change the circumstances to test that hypothesis, nor can we test it now because we live in the world created by capitalist addiction to fossil fuels. But another world was possible.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
That depends what period you're looking at. From the time of Catherine II, till the end of the Romanovs, capital punishment was used less frequently than between 1917 - 1953, in favour of internal exile. Of course, there was serfdom until 1861, but then the Communists also made extensive use of slave labour, up till 1953. Soviet industrialisation was impressive (with US manufacturers providing a huge level of technology), along with the performance of the Red Army. But life in the countryside, where most citizens lived, was dire, with famine, forcible collectivsation, dekulakisation, all taking their toll on the population.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
The environment doesn't care whether the factory is owned by a capitalist, or owned by the state, or owned by the workers. Blaming climate change on "capitalist organisation" isn't serious.
You say you want to reverse what you call neoliberalism but in reality you would be horrified by the idea, because it would mean less immigration and a more rigid labour market.
No - ending neoliberalism would not automatically mean less immigration - again, if it was done in an anarchist manner it would mean dissolution of states. If you were to dissolve neoliberalism and replace it with fascism, sure!
I would argue that workers would be less likely to destroy the world - of course. The reasoning is simple - the accumulation of wealth damages your ability to empathise and your incentives to work with society (because you believe you have the leverage to act in away to secure yourself without needing society). Workers, collectively, make up society in a way that the capitalist who owns the means of production just don't. In the same way a worker collective would not vote to offshore their own jobs (because they are not incentivised to maximise profit for shareholders and discipline labour by going to regimes with laxer labour regulations) they would not vote for the destruction of the planet.
When GM and Ford were told about the science of climate change in the 60s, they didn't care because short term profits were more important than the continued survival of the world, and in that time invested in embedding fossil fuels into the world economy and funding a right wing reaction to the scientific reality (very similar to how smoking was known to kill and money was spent on PR and research to obscure this). I trust that if workers were in the position of power at that point, they would have made the right decision. We can't roll back time and change the circumstances to test that hypothesis, nor can we test it now because we live in the world created by capitalist addiction to fossil fuels. But another world was possible.
The USSR existed in the 1960s. What were their environmental policies like? Why did they not make climate neutral cars for all the workers?
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
We've gone from about 40% of the world's inhabitants living in absolute poverty, in 1980, to about 8% now.
Have to say i am surprised the gap between the 2 Tory Parties have narrowed from 17 to 14 in a week
Deltapoll @DeltapollUK · 1h 🚨🚨New Voting Intention🚨🚨 Labour lead narrows to fourteen points in the latest results from Deltapoll. Con 29% (+1) Lab 43% (-2) Lib Dem 10% (+1) Other 19% (+2) Fieldwork: 26th - 29th January 2024 Sample: 2,064 GB adults (Changes from 19th - 22nd January 2024)
Deltapoll had Labour with an eleven point lead only six weeks ago. ( https://deltapoll.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Deltapoll-231211_trackers.pdf ) . You got a hard on over that too. Two weeks later it went up to 14 points for the New Year. Silence from you. We heard nary a peep from you over the sixteen and seventeen point leads they achieved in the January interim either.
Perhaps you are a bit...selective... in the polls you choose to repost?
The first, in English. The second, in Italian, with Quattro instead of Four
Indeed. Unless you also say 'Mmmmm these spaghetti are delicious'
Worst argument I ever had with a friend was over whether 'raviolis' was permitted in Scrabble - I had put it down to get IIRC two trebles at the same time, so wasn't going to back down. It is a valid plural acc to Scrabble (it uses Chambers Dictionary as the arbiter elegantiae).
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
So apart from the murders, the famines, the closed borders (to stop people leaving), the rationing, the extreme poverty (for all but a very small social elite who lived like Henry VIII), Soviet Russia was awesome?
I didn't say that - at all.
And capitalism has presided over no state orchestrated murders nor ethnic cleansings, no famines or closed borders, no extreme poverty? I mean, we can just look at the history of United Fruit for one example of many of those things - all in the name of a company wanting to keep its profits going against the democratic wishes of a country that didn't want to be controlled by foreign, private capital. We could look at the history of Iran and ask the question "why is it like it is now?" and think about BP and the movement of oil. We could look at the history of Coca Cola, and state funded militias, and the destruction of whole ecosystems and indigenous societies.
And that's pre Reagan and Thatcher - before we get to how modern resource extraction works, how modern labour conditions are so terrible in factories across the world that child labour is commonplace and that anti-suicide netting is needed to prevent workers jumping out of the windows. How often states support capital in their fights against common people who just don't wish to be oppressed and dispossessed and destroyed - all for a few people to live high on massive profits.
If you want an economic model that allows for extreme poverty and a very small social elite who live in unimaginable wealth - you're living under one.
Just realised I haven't been out on my balcony since the morning
I'm going to go and "stand on the balcony" to "take in the air". That should use up 7 minutes
This may be my new hobby. "Taking in the air"
I'll keep you posted
"Take the air" is the correct expression if you want to be the English expat on the Riviera at Mentone or wherever you are.
"Take in the air" is as in "how long does my Findus crispy pancake take in the air fryer?".
You’re quite right. Of course
It is “take the air” - what was I thinking
And I am now in fact Taking the air. My new hobby
Not a bad view from the balcony
Each to their own. I prefer the view from my place.
I doubt your view looks like that right now, tho? In late January?
I do love a nice rural view, however; just as much as I love good urban views
There is something particular about tropical cities at night, nonetheless. They are intrinsically intoxicating in a way other cities are not (at night)
Well done on limiting your booze intake so successfully
I am belatedly doing the same but hoping to find a medium course of still drinking at times but also having half the week entirely sober etc
Question: how do you cope with the boredom? That is what vexes me, still. Booze used to agreeably fill an evening. Now the hours stretch. Yes I read and go to the gym and watch movies and that’s nice but wow there is a lot of time to fill, nonetheless
Sometimes I just want to go to bed at 10pm even if I’m not tired because unconsciousness is less boring
I haven't had a drink since NYE, this is my fourth time doing Dry January. Since doing it the first time I've found the amount I drink has dropped without any real effort on my part, largely by not drinking in the house and not going to the pub as much. I love alcohol as a social drug but I was never one for nailing a load of cans in front of the TV like mates of mine can do. But even the glass or two of wine or glass of whisky at home has dwindled to virtually nothing. I've found that in my 40s the hangovers are now so bad and long-lasting I just don't go to the pub as much as I used to either. From being 17 to late-30s it was three/four times a week, probably drinking a gallon a time. Now, thanks to using a drink tracking app I started using for my first Dry Jan, I find I average ten days drinking a month, and most of those days are only one or two units. I love a proper sesh in the pub with my mates but it takes me two or three days to get over it. I can cope with the headache, it's the two or three days of lethargy and increasingly bad hangxiety that have curbed by pub visits.
So I have a lot more sober time these past few years. I love it. I read more - and more importantly, remember what I've read. I take longer, more frequent walks, which the dog appreciates. I try and go for a run a few times a week. I play the guitar - badly. I recently got into listening to podcasts. Plus there's always YouTube. I'm also considering whether I want to do a PhD part-time while working, but that way madness may well lie so I blow hot and cold with the notion.
But I'm very rarely bored. Not like you were on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the 80s when I was growing up and there was nothing on TV. That was proper boredom.
I go to bed when I'm tired, usually about 11 but two nights last week it was half 9. If that's boring, so be it - FOMO isn't a thing for me anymore!
I've also cut down on caffeine - I have two builders teas first thing them that's me. As I've hit middle age my body just can't deal with alcohol and caffeine like it did when I was younger. I hit it hard when I was young, I shovelled everything into me I could get my hands on, but I'm glad those days are behind me. I just can't do it now. Nor do I want to.
I wish I could go out on a Friday for a gallon without it wiping out my weekend, but sometimes you just wanna get pissed and talk rubbish with your mates, don't you? So I take the hit and the missus moaning at me for wasting my weekend...
That's a long-winded way of saying I enjoyed getting hammered when I was young, but I prefer a clear head now, and I always manage to keep myself amused.
I water down every alcoholic drink I have now, which means I never get to the hangover stage. My theory was that you never beat the two or three pint buzz, and any more after that was just giving you worse hangovers without making the night better. Now I can’t drink alcohol that’s not watered down, albeit I do probably drink too often
I think that's spot on, and I find the lack of lower alcohol, but still tasty, beer incredibly annoying. I'd like to have one pint of 4% beer, and follow it by 2% ones. That would mean my body is processing the alcohol at roughly the same rate I'm drinking, and it won't feel like cheating. It would obviously almost halve how much beer I drank out on a curry night with my mates too.
It's such a pain trying to find decent ones that there are firms such as Drydrinker.com which specialise in them - soi you needn't put up with what your supermarket has. The ciders have some hits there IMO - haven't explored the beers. I don't like too much tea or coffee, can't stand soft drinks as too sweet, and council juice aka H20 is fine but for lunch or similar something else is nice. But that is no good if you are going out and you need to take what you are given. In Oz I'd just have a half pint of cider in a pint glass and fill up with ice and sparkling water - too much risk of dehydration else. Maybe something like that here.
A header that mentions the "neoliberal consensus" - good to see pieces recognising that states selling off civic assets may not be seen as a good deal by a majority of the public who like those assets and services and aren't profiting off of them being sold whole sale.
I think we're getting into a position similar to the 20th century - the paradoxes of capitalism are coming home to roost and the inaction of states to safeguard the material needs of the average person is leading towards grievance and a willingness to embrace the far right, even if you don't like them. Liberals are unpopular because they refuse to deal with the issues, left wingers are unpopular because the apparatus of capital control most media and would lose out under a more left wing world so scream bloody hell about anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun. And the right are unpopular because their wish casting politics just can't be done.
"embrace the far right"
As Corbyn and his acolytes show, the far left also has significant power for the disaffected.
But the entire force of capital, which includes the private media and the political establishment, go out of there way to make left wing policies solutions the equivalent of literal Stalinism whilst painting far right rhetoric as "common sense". The Overton window can only go one way for those people - it's the ratchet effect. So people seeing how impossible it is to get left wing solutions (and Corbyn is hardly far left, he proposed a social democratic policy platform that, when polled on issue by issue rather then as "Corbyn's policies", did have popular support) become disaffected and those who desire a far right solution get told it is always possible (because every party panders to them) and that when their policy preference is enacted and doesn't work that's because it wasn't done harshly enough and the answer is to go even more right wing.
"But the entire force of capital". You been at the Koolaid again? What is this 1875 and we are discussing the Communist Manifesto?
At heart most people like capitalism. What they want is for capitalism to be fair - so no unfair advantages of birth, of wealth etc. They want hard work rewarded.
What they don't want is bullshit economic theories about 'capital' and the 'politcal establishment' etc
Capitalism does not reward fairness or meritocracy - those things are not inherently capitalistic. The advantages of birth are backed into capitalism; inheritance whether in money or assets is the highest predictor of wealth later in life. People who work hard are not rewarded under capitalism. We recognised under Covid that their were such things as "essential workers" - who were they? Shop assistants, nurses, public servants and the like - are they the most well paid? Does a CEO or shareholder of a company work whatever ratio it has more than their lowest paid worker? Capitalism rewards those who help accumulate more capital for capitalists. To do otherwise is counter to capitalist mode of production.
So what is your solution then?
Hard work is rewarded - but yes every job comes with its own salary, and some of them are grossly unfair. And yet. Is it right for a CEO to earn millions? Maybe, if they can show that their input actual generates substantially more than that.
Should lower paid jobs be better paid? Yes - in an ideal world people would not need extra money from government if they are working a 37.5h week. But is it right that I earn more as a Uni lecturer than someone that works in retail? I bring a lifetime of experience of my subject to the role, you can be trained for a job on the tills and stacking shelves in days.
Capitalism cannot be left to run without check, for sure, but I have not seen a better arrangement suggested. What do you propose?
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs - I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable. What that means practically? If you're in favour of a state that would mean, in part, state management of resources, workers councils who own the means of production, the seizing and redistribution of assets from the rich to the poor, etc. etc. If you're not in favour of a state (personally I'm not) you would do what the anarchists did in places like Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and what is happening in Rojava now; community and workers councils making democratic decisions about issues and deciding what to do and trade for themselves. Is this Utopian - yes, of course.
I would be happy in the mean time for more social democratic reform, wealth redistribution, empowerment of unions and individual workers and an increased social safety net. These are the things that would tackle the immediate problems that the "free market" are clearly making worse - inflation (to a degree, climate change will increase the scarcity of lots of essential resources), housing, poverty and malnourishment, etc.
"I do not see why profit motive is necessary or why the private mass accumulation of capital is acceptable."
Because HUMAN NATURE. Its how we are wired, I'm afraid. People want stuff. So you basically are an unapologetic communist. Are you Ash Sarkar? She of the luxury communism bent?
In feudal times there were lots of people, including many of those at the bottom of society, who believed it was the natural and right order of things, and they could not conceive of society being ordered in any different way.
There's nothing in human nature that makes capitalism the only, or optimal, way to organise society. We could do things differently if we wanted to. Albeit I would have hoped that the seven quarters of a century since the Communist Manifesto might have provided a few more appealing glimpses of what an alternative might look like than have been provided.
There is also no reason why an anarchist or communist model of managing the economy also couldn’t provide people with stuff - it would just mean that the people who have over accumulated stuff would have less stuff. I’m a champagne socialist - redistribute the access to champagne to the working classes. Bread and roses.
In a stateless economy, it's not champagne you'd be distributing but heroin and other narcotics, and de facto slavery would be commonplace.
See how the USSR provided people with stuff, compared with say the USA (or even the UK).
The USSR was not stateless - it was a union of Soviet States. But also, just after the revolution, the standard of living for the average Russian did greatly improve. Same in China after their revolution. That doesn't mean everything they did to achieve that was good, or the communist state that did it was good, but it was clearly better than what had come previously under the Tsar and Imperial China. Do people here really think the history of Romanov rule, for example, was better than communist Russia?
But in both cases, it then went very wrong very quickly.
In many ways, yes, in other ways progress was made. Again, I don’t defend state communism or what happened under it, but many people were pulled out of poverty by it, in the USSR education and rights for women (for example) was greatly expanded, and the economies essentially went straight from serfdom into industrialisation.
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
The environment doesn't care whether the factory is owned by a capitalist, or owned by the state, or owned by the workers. Blaming climate change on "capitalist organisation" isn't serious.
You say you want to reverse what you call neoliberalism but in reality you would be horrified by the idea, because it would mean less immigration and a more rigid labour market.
No - ending neoliberalism would not automatically mean less immigration - again, if it was done in an anarchist manner it would mean dissolution of states. If you were to dissolve neoliberalism and replace it with fascism, sure!
I would argue that workers would be less likely to destroy the world - of course. The reasoning is simple - the accumulation of wealth damages your ability to empathise and your incentives to work with society (because you believe you have the leverage to act in away to secure yourself without needing society). Workers, collectively, make up society in a way that the capitalist who owns the means of production just don't. In the same way a worker collective would not vote to offshore their own jobs (because they are not incentivised to maximise profit for shareholders and discipline labour by going to regimes with laxer labour regulations) they would not vote for the destruction of the planet.
When GM and Ford were told about the science of climate change in the 60s, they didn't care because short term profits were more important than the continued survival of the world, and in that time invested in embedding fossil fuels into the world economy and funding a right wing reaction to the scientific reality (very similar to how smoking was known to kill and money was spent on PR and research to obscure this). I trust that if workers were in the position of power at that point, they would have made the right decision. We can't roll back time and change the circumstances to test that hypothesis, nor can we test it now because we live in the world created by capitalist addiction to fossil fuels. But another world was possible.
The USSR existed in the 1960s. What were their environmental policies like? Why did they not make climate neutral cars for all the workers?
They did the trabant was eco friendly because it rarely worked so no emissions
Comments
Correct answer is "three greys goose", which also has absolutely zero chance of being misinterpreted.
I have been more discriminated in this country because of my private education than my ethnicity or religion.
I really deserve a medal/compensation for this bigotry.
However, overall ' ..73 per cent of state school graduates gained a first or upper second class degree compared with 82 per cent of independent school graduates'
You can have a large percentage of the economy going through the state without that being remotely leftwing (though admittedly some on the left don't seem to realise this).
You posted a picture of Tommy Robinson saying, ironically (ho ho) that it was "impossible for him to be a fascist" and thereby mocking Israel supporters and with the intent of showing how support for Israel could indeed be a fascist position and here was Robinson proving your point.
And I pointed out that this was not a position that supporters of Israel adopted. They didn't want him to attend their events and said he was not welcome, thus giving the lie to your position of Tommy Robinson = Israel supporters = "fashy far right".
You are most welcome.
Some people may be happy with a very limited lot. Arguably most people come to realise that stuff isn't really the answer as the they get older - good friendship and good times is better. But I think wanting things is just part of nature that communists don't seem to understand.
And never forget, in the good old USSR, there used to to be the shop for party officials only. All equal, but some more equal than others.
Do you ask for
Four cappuccinos
Or
Four cappuccini
Can you imagine the stick someone would get if heard ordering ‘3 Grey Geese’?!?!
That’s a Fast Show sketch
Edit: Three Grey Goose vodkas please. Thanks.
19C in January. It's the meteorological equivalent of 13% for Reform in an opinion poll. It tells you that something is definitely going on.
I can go to bed soon
YAYYYYY
I don’t have kids and could go down to a 4 day work week so 15 hours a week isn’t unrealistic at all.
When I spoke to my old tutor before Xmas he mentioned that an MPhil might be a nice way in for me initially, with the option of continuing beyond that if I want to.
Once I decide I want something I am very stubborn and determined and generally get what I want. My problem has always been on deciding what exactly it is I want! I love the idea of doing a PhD. I love being in archives, I enjoy writing. But I am not convinced I want to devote six years to one. So an MPhil is not a bad compromise perhaps.
Quattro cappuccini
My explanation of your post was exactly right and you know it hence your blathering.
Just realised I haven't been out on my balcony since the morning
I'm going to go and "stand on the balcony" to "take in the air". That should use up 7 minutes
This may be my new hobby. "Taking in the air"
I'll keep you posted
If we leave out student visas, the point still stands. UK migration is much more work and family visas than it is about refugees, and the refugees are not all fleeing countries undergoing turmoil due to the actions of the West. In other words, what you said was wrong.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/english-council-littering-fines-peeing-in-countryside-dacorum-hertfordshire
'Michael Mason, who has a weakened prostate, was handed a fine after he stopped at a layby on the A41 near Kings Langley to take what he described as a “discreet” wee, BBC News reported last month. Then, later in December, another man, who has asked not to be named, was caught out in similar circumstances at a layby in the area.
In both cases, the men were stopped by an employee of District Enforcement, which despite its official-sounding name is a private company contracted by Dacorum council to issue penalty fines. The council receives 22% of the fines and the company retains 78%.
The second recipient had his fine rescinded after arguing to the council that its enforcers had not seen him urinating. His uncle complained to Dacorum council, arguing that urinating in the countryside – or indeed anywhere – could not constitute littering.'
I'm left with two unanswered thoughts - if someone came on at me and wanted to watch me when I was having a piddle on my own in the countryside, I'd be reporting him to the polis for indecency etc. And don't Dacorum provide public conveniences? Or is this a scheme to save money by not providing them, and then make (a little bit of) the profit from not doing so?
And Rojava have methods of dealing with antisocial behaviour - communally. This method was highly effective at dealing with a big issue at the beginning of the Rojavan revolution - blood feuds and honour killings. Families had blood feuds and were killing each other in a cycle of violence. The community elected that the "grandmothers", a group of about half a dozen elder women, should do mediation between the feuding families. These grandmothers would listen to the grievances and talk about what each side would accept as reparations for their grievance, and then negotiated these between the families and with the community. This was then solidified through a big dinner - a culturally significant event that essentially expresses friendship and a return to normal relations between people.
Capitalism has isolated and atomised people - Thatcher has got her wish after saying "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family unit". As community ties have broken down, of course it is difficult to imagine community solutions to such issues as antisocial behaviour. But, interestingly, we see the human impulse for such things all the time - when Covid broke out people spontaneously set up mutual aid systems between neighbours who could and couldn't leave the house, etc. The state then decided to take this over and added bureaucracy to it, both to essentially means test the support, but also (unconsciously, I would argue) to keep their monopoly on human intervention and support and prevent people realising that mutual aid is really easy and simple and doesn't need the state to happen.
"Take in the air" is as in "how long does my Findus crispy pancake take in the air fryer?".
If it's just the two servings that would be a brace, presumably. A brace of your finest Geese, landlord.
Just the kind of conversation some pubs love, particularly ones with "duck or grouse" written on low beams.
Of course, the private sector may well have to respond to this (unless their sales pitch changes).
I think you live a dream world if you think mankind would ever welcome an anarchist state.
In fact many universities are engaged in a form of asset stripping, selling overpriced degrees to foreigners to exploit the residual brand value of a British education, while actively devaluing it.
(I did once observe two young men at a bar where I live, one of whom ordered the Macallan 18yo, and the other the Remy Martin XO, both of them with Coke please
is the most elegant construction.
is archaic although preferred in some schools.
You'll probably cover the purges when you do the A level, next year.
Laurence Fox loses libel battle with Twitter users he called paedophiles
Reclaim party founder defamed two men on site now known as X after they called him a racist, judge rules
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/jan/29/laurence-fox-loses-libel-battle-with-twitter-x-users-he-called-paedophiles?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
And what of capitalism? Since Reagan and Thatcher, the birth of neoliberalism and the unleashing of the markets, the world has gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. The capitalist organisation of the economy is literally making the planet uninhabitable. Boom and bust cycles were not destroyed, wages have stagnated whilst profits have soared, and the more the state is cut back from supporting people the more people fall into poverty and immiseration.
It is “take the air” - what was I thinking
And I am now in fact Taking the air. My new hobby
Not a bad view from the balcony
How many died in the USSR from 1917 to 1989 at the hands of the state? How many starved to death in Stalin's famine in Ukraine? How many did Mao kill with his ludicrous plans?
How anyone can bring such examples to the table as 'improving on what had gone before' is beyond belief.
One minute you're s**ging Billie Piper and the next you're living in a rented bedsit above a chip shop.
It's a funny old game Saint.
You say you want to reverse what you call neoliberalism but in reality you would be horrified by the idea, because it would mean less immigration and a more rigid labour market.
Although after ingesting cocaine, maybe one can't tell the quality of a spirit anyway?* So it's just as bad as mixing it - with Coke or 'coke'.
*I have no experience in this field
Me, I'd say "three grey gooses".
Rationale: The drink is sufficiently removed from what it's named after to allow you to play fast and loose and just choose what sounds best - which is the above.
Thank goodness I'm a forgiving soul else I could take being called a paedophile by a PBer in his late night cups to the bank.
But that was in another country (the past), and besides, that username is dead.
I would argue that workers would be less likely to destroy the world - of course. The reasoning is simple - the accumulation of wealth damages your ability to empathise and your incentives to work with society (because you believe you have the leverage to act in away to secure yourself without needing society). Workers, collectively, make up society in a way that the capitalist who owns the means of production just don't. In the same way a worker collective would not vote to offshore their own jobs (because they are not incentivised to maximise profit for shareholders and discipline labour by going to regimes with laxer labour regulations) they would not vote for the destruction of the planet.
When GM and Ford were told about the science of climate change in the 60s, they didn't care because short term profits were more important than the continued survival of the world, and in that time invested in embedding fossil fuels into the world economy and funding a right wing reaction to the scientific reality (very similar to how smoking was known to kill and money was spent on PR and research to obscure this). I trust that if workers were in the position of power at that point, they would have made the right decision. We can't roll back time and change the circumstances to test that hypothesis, nor can we test it now because we live in the world created by capitalist addiction to fossil fuels. But another world was possible.
Perhaps you are a bit...selective... in the polls you choose to repost?
And capitalism has presided over no state orchestrated murders nor ethnic cleansings, no famines or closed borders, no extreme poverty? I mean, we can just look at the history of United Fruit for one example of many of those things - all in the name of a company wanting to keep its profits going against the democratic wishes of a country that didn't want to be controlled by foreign, private capital. We could look at the history of Iran and ask the question "why is it like it is now?" and think about BP and the movement of oil. We could look at the history of Coca Cola, and state funded militias, and the destruction of whole ecosystems and indigenous societies.
And that's pre Reagan and Thatcher - before we get to how modern resource extraction works, how modern labour conditions are so terrible in factories across the world that child labour is commonplace and that anti-suicide netting is needed to prevent workers jumping out of the windows. How often states support capital in their fights against common people who just don't wish to be oppressed and dispossessed and destroyed - all for a few people to live high on massive profits.
If you want an economic model that allows for extreme poverty and a very small social elite who live in unimaginable wealth - you're living under one.
I do love a nice rural view, however; just as much as I love good urban views
There is something particular about tropical cities at night, nonetheless. They are intrinsically intoxicating in a way other cities are not (at night)