The coalition of voters Labour won in 1997 is still out there (says the Times), who knew?
Although any voter under 45 couldn't have been in the coalition of voters that Labour won in 1997, most voters who were at or above retirement age in 1997 are no longer with us, and the priorities of individuals will have moved on (the young New Labour voter is deep into middle age, the middle aged one is retired etc). Meanwhile, the world is similar to 1997 in certain respects, but different in others.
I get the broad point being made, but it does slightly gloss over the passage of time.
OK it's coming up to 5:30 and I need to do some work for tomorrow. If anybody has further questions/praise/criticism/whatever please leave messages: I'll summarize around 9-10pm and integrate them into the extended cut at some later date. Thank you all, as your responses make the article better.
I always roll my eyes involuntarily when someone portentously announces 'moving on from neoliberalism'. One doesn’t move on from the immutable truths of how economies work, any more than one moves on from breathing, but one can get worse or better at it, depending on which blockages and restrictions the system operates under.
I hope and believe that the UK is not entering a prolonged era of the morbidly obese state choking what's left of the economy, despite the two main parties providing plenty of reasons for pessimism.
OK it's coming up to 5:30 and I need to do some work for tomorrow. If anybody has further questions/praise/criticism/whatever please leave messages: I'll summarize around 9-10pm and integrate them into the extended cut at some later date. Thank you all, as your responses make the article better.
I really like the fact you are so open and inviting of comments and criticism on your posts, I have nothing negative to say but this is a quality I admire in you that I've seen you do many times.
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
The family?
Oh, yes. Just look at kibbutzim. Or the English-style "Public School" (boarding variety). Or indeed the workhouse, also English style (not sure about how the Scots or Welsh ones worked, I just happen to have read up about the southern ones). Definite alternatives to the family.
Interesting article but I suspect the speaker you quote has taken a whole lot of personal prejudices and constructed a philosophy out of it.
She's keen on these things being decided at the UK level because it is for the moment run by a morally conservative government while Scotland and internationally to some extent are more progressive and not to her liking .
Well yes, but I'm perfectly willing to take her framework and run with it. I don't agree with her position on the axis and mine would be at the other end to hers, but I can use the concept of a humanist-posthumanist axis and use it for statistical purposes. For example "Party X scores 9 on the suthoritarian axis and 1 on the transhuman axis, so person Y who wants abortion to be banned will vote for Party X". From my POV it's another tool in the box
You may be right. That Rishi Sunak should have a policy of preventing the rest of us having any say over what we do with our own bodies is an idea I find so bizarre, I possibly wasn't aware this is a policy he does actually have.
Interesting article but I suspect the speaker you quote has taken a whole lot of personal prejudices and constructed a philosophy out of it.
She's keen on these things being decided at the UK level because it is for the moment run by a morally conservative government while Scotland and internationally to some extent are more progressive and not to her liking .
Well yes, but I'm perfectly willing to take her framework and run with it. I don't agree with her position on the axis and mine would be at the other end to hers, but I can use the concept of a humanist-posthumanist axis and use it for statistical purposes. For example "Party X scores 9 on the suthoritarian axis and 1 on the transhuman axis, so person Y who wants abortion to be banned will vote for Party X". From my POV it's another tool in the box
You may be right. That Rishi Sunak should have a policy of preventing the rest of us having any say over what we do with our own bodies is an idea I find so bizarre, I possibly wasn't aware this is a policy he does actually have.
It would be interesting to see him asked for his opinion on Prince Alberts, or growth hormone* on demand, or the Tory view on freedom and cutting off and frying one's own bits when friends come around for dinner.
*NB: not suggested for the obvious reason, but because AIUI it is often given to children who are merely short, not for any real medical reason. Unless social norms and parental demands are a medical reason?
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
The family?
Oh, yes. Just look at kibbutzim. Or the English-style "Public School" (boarding variety). Or indeed the workhouse, also English style (not sure about how the Scots or Welsh ones worked, I just happen to have read up about the southern ones). Definite alternatives to the family.
For sure, humans pretty much make up everything as we go along.
Of course in Scotland we have a political party* dedicated to preserving their idea of the family, though against the depredations of the devolved Scottish government rather than the benevolent unitary state of the UK.
*When I say a political party I mean a pressure group that gets attention by making a lot noise rather than actually persuading people to vote for them.
An interesting piece, thanks. It's interesting to see someone on the right arguing that issues like abortion shouldn't be decided at a subnational level, given that the US debate has the right arguing the precise opposite! I wonder whether there may be some self interest at play here? I'm suspicious of attempts to create a grand narrative around quite complex and nuanced issues, it feels like a recipe for authoritarianism and bad law. If you can't do anything to alter the human body, what about heart surgery, or IVF, or body piercings or tattoos? People who think the state has no business making sure that kids aren't going to bed hungry but want it interfering in every kind of way in their personal choices worry me.
OT but interesting follow up to an earlier discussiion re apparent fraud by carers: the system is such that it's not easy to be honest and accurate without losing out (and the effective "tax" rate is 8090% at the margin).
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
Why?
The previous one, of Great Britain and Ireland, was evidently not worth saving.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the state of England [and Wales].
Because, after much fussing and shouting and killing, we seem to have arrived at something that works. Despite all the arguments NI and Scotland are still in the UK, and Wales solved the problem by leaving but never telling anybody. It would cost too much money and time to change, so let's not. NI can leave when it wants but provided we don't force it out we should be OK.
But on precisely that argument, CR would insist on using whatever measures he saw necessary to preserve UKGBNI just because it was the current state. He wouldn't dream of letting [edit] NI leave, any more than our Tories would permit an indyref again.
Another Indyref should happen again if there is a nationalist Scottish administration that is elected on such a manifesto, and if a generation (reasonably defined as 25 years) has passed since the last one.
How long did the Thatcherite generation last? How long did the New Labour generation last?
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
Why?
The previous one, of Great Britain and Ireland, was evidently not worth saving.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the state of England [and Wales].
Because, after much fussing and shouting and killing, we seem to have arrived at something that works. Despite all the arguments NI and Scotland are still in the UK, and Wales solved the problem by leaving but never telling anybody. It would cost too much money and time to change, so let's not. NI can leave when it wants but provided we don't force it out we should be OK.
But on precisely that argument, CR would insist on using whatever measures he saw necessary to preserve UKGBNI just because it was the current state. He wouldn't dream of letting [edit] NI leave, any more than our Tories would permit an indyref again.
Another Indyref should happen again if there is a nationalist Scottish administration that is elected on such a manifesto, and if a generation (reasonably defined as 25 years) has passed since the last one.
How long did the Thatcherite generation last? How long did the New Labour generation last?
In contradistinction to this is the other side: the “humanist” belief that technology should be constrained to only restore the body to its normative state: repair, not enhance.
Would that it were so simple - trad people who want technology to heal, restore, make good and normalise; OTOH those who want to use technology to abolish death, age, IQ limits and so on.
Absolute nonsense. The truth lies in a very muddled middle. The state of nature - human normality - is one in which we are by nature massively prone to die of deadly infectious diseases, most children die young, many women die in childbirth, those who survive have 15 children of which about 2 or 3 on average survive. Nature is horrible.
It is amazing and wonderful that we can artificially ensure our children don't die of smallpox and 30 other deadly diseases, and that few women die in childbirth. This is not a return to or restoration of nature but a triumph over them.
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
Why?
The previous one, of Great Britain and Ireland, was evidently not worth saving.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the state of England [and Wales].
Because, after much fussing and shouting and killing, we seem to have arrived at something that works. Despite all the arguments NI and Scotland are still in the UK, and Wales solved the problem by leaving but never telling anybody. It would cost too much money and time to change, so let's not. NI can leave when it wants but provided we don't force it out we should be OK.
But on precisely that argument, CR would insist on using whatever measures he saw necessary to preserve UKGBNI just because it was the current state. He wouldn't dream of letting [edit] NI leave, any more than our Tories would permit an indyref again.
Another Indyref should happen again if there is a nationalist Scottish administration that is elected on such a manifesto, and if a generation (reasonably defined as 25 years) has passed since the last one.
How long did the Thatcherite generation last? How long did the New Labour generation last?
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
There are other subsets of people, too, though, ofcourse.
I would be one of the those people tending to regard aspects of the body as precious, but I have no interest in dictating my own idea of this to everyone via the state. Instead, I would want personal liberty and freedom for anyone seeking it, from either a totalising materialism and techno-futurism on the one hand, or state-decreed limits, or authoritarianism on the other.
NY Magazine - Lauren Boebert Is Still on Her Worst Behavior
By Matt Stieb, Intelligencer staff writer - When people experience a moment of public embarrassment for which they are at fault, it sometimes motivates them to change their behavior. Representative Lauren Boebert has not gone this route. Three months after she was kicked out of a theater for vaping in front of a pregnant woman and getting handsy with her date, CNN reports that she had a little too much fun at the New York Young Republican Club’s annual holiday gala.
During the party, held at Cipriani Wall Street, waitstaff reportedly cut Boebert off after a long night of drinking, with one source at the event telling CNN that a “server told the congresswoman they believed she had been overserved.” Boebert (who has met Donald Trump many times) then kept trying to take selfies with the former president, who was seated at her table. It reportedly got so bad that Trump’s security pulled her aside and asked her to please stop.
Like any seasoned partyer, Boebert knew what to do next: relocate to a different bar. Despite the behavior check at the cavernous downtown restaurant, photos from that night show Boebert going uptown to an after-party with George Santos at the conservative hot spot Beach Café on the Upper East Side.
Boebert, who is currently recovering from an emergency surgery for a blood clot in her leg, is facing tough election prospects after switching districts in pursuit of an easier route back to Congress. Thankfully, though, her behavior at the holiday party did not affect her standing within the Republican party. Last month, Trump endorsed her as a “trusted America first fighter.”
SSI - Not sure just HOW this fits in with vc's interesting posting, except to note that "enhanced" may or may NOT be fit description of Rep. LB (R-Screw Loose).
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
You should email them in Welsh and demand the Welsh translation pronto.
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Sort of, yes. Which is why I found the 'nation state' focus a bit odd in a deep philosophical matter like this. Not wrong as such but a bit odd. Suspect it's tossed in to comply with the anti-Sindy and anti-EU sentiment of the target audience. Just a thought. Could be me straining to make an interesting point.
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
Why?
The previous one, of Great Britain and Ireland, was evidently not worth saving.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the state of England [and Wales].
Because, after much fussing and shouting and killing, we seem to have arrived at something that works. Despite all the arguments NI and Scotland are still in the UK, and Wales solved the problem by leaving but never telling anybody. It would cost too much money and time to change, so let's not. NI can leave when it wants but provided we don't force it out we should be OK.
But on precisely that argument, CR would insist on using whatever measures he saw necessary to preserve UKGBNI just because it was the current state. He wouldn't dream of letting [edit] NI leave, any more than our Tories would permit an indyref again.
Another Indyref should happen again if there is a nationalist Scottish administration that is elected on such a manifesto, and if a generation (reasonably defined as 25 years) has passed since the last one.
How long did the Thatcherite generation last? How long did the New Labour generation last?
Interesting article. Viewcode is to be commended on a thought-provoking post.
Ultimately I'm a classical liberal in the sense that we have primarily self-regarding actions and primarily other-regarding actions. And it's nobody's bloody business what self-regarding actions I do.
So if I want to take HRT to become more feminine, that's really nobody's business but my own. Ditto, if I want to take testosterone and get swole, that's my business. It only really becomes somebody else's business if I decide to enter a weightlifting competition, the tour de france, etc.
The same goes for drugs like cocaine. If I decide to ingest it, that's my business, not the state's. Yes, other people are impacted - but those are largely a consequence of the effects of prohibition creating a black market cornered by gangsters, not the act of taking the drug itself. If I get coked up and go to the footy and get in a fight, that's different.
My point is that I do think this is a stance that should be covered by libertarian or classically liberal principles, which is why it strikes me as so odd that "the right" seems to come down on the humanist rather than transhumanist side. Does this mean it should be treated as a separate political axis? I'm not sure. I find it hard to separate my transhumanist position from my classically liberal position, the two are intertwined to the point they are the same thing. However, it's clear from the general discourse that this isn't the case in society at large - there are a lot of people who are very keen on a small state and lower taxes, but still happy to police other people's bodies. I find their position logically incoherent. "Biopolitics" shouldn't be conducted at the national level, they should be conducted at the individual level. A human being should be sovereign over their own body.
‘Humanist’ is an odd choice of term for opposition to the ‘transhumanist’ stance, given many of the positions viewcode describes are rooted in traditional religious belief.
Humanism is, of course, a philosophy which has been around for a very long time, and even without the poaching of the term whose definition would be hard to reach a consensus over.
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
My own guess, is that the "survey" is "one size fits all" designed for distribution in England AND Wales but NOT Scotland.
With (perhaps) English Tory candidates NOT having sense enough - or (maybe) being unable to - remove the PC option?
Two mega-polls that have thickened the miasma of doom enveloping the Conservatives by suggesting they could be heading for a defeat as calamitous, and possibly even more catastrophic, than the one they experienced 27 years ago.
It is scary for Tory MPs that their party languishes so far behind in the headline polls; it is even more terrifying to be told that they are individually fated to be felled. The YouGov projection, published last week, has the Tories plunging to just 155 MPs.
There’s a consolation that the prime minister and his people cling to. This is the notion that many voters who are presently saying they are undecided will end up plumping for the Tories come election day. Yet most of the pollsters already factor in an assumption that Don’t Knows who were Conservative supporters in 2019 are more likely to break to the Tories when we get to the crunch. If that assumption is faulty or exaggerated, then the pollsters may not be being too harsh about Tory prospects, but too generous.
If Sir Keir Starmer is truly on course for a super-majority, it would look even more impressive for being such a remarkable turnaround from Labour’s result in 2019, its worst since 1935. A Labour super-majority won’t mean an easy life for a Starmer government. It will still have to grapple with a grim inheritance. Having a lot of Labour MPs won’t magically lift the rate of economic growth or instantly repair ravaged public services.
Many of the Blair generation, including the man himself, would now say that they wasted time in their early period in office. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher, though her 1979 majority was much more modest, quickly got cracking with her radical right revolution.
There’s a moral here for Sir Keir and his putative cabinet. When it comes to majorities, it is not so much the size that counts as what you do with it.
Thanks to SeaShantyIrish for the links on Mary Harrington.
Interesting ; some things that I think are total nonsense, and some which deserve further consideration, particularly on the current wave of ideology regarding the body as malleable "meat lego." A relief to hear that the Telegraph is still occasionally taking a break from printing total undifferentiated and jingoistic rubbish these days, and some curate's eggs articles are still in it.
In what way has AI enhanced this article?, how do we know that it hasn't hallucinated some of her views?
That aside, I don't see it as a useful axis or concept. It isn't remarkable to be pro abortion and anti-Transgender, or pro cosmetic surgery such as tooth whitening while anti- assisted suicide.
Interesting article but I suspect the speaker you quote has taken a whole lot of personal prejudices and constructed a philosophy out of it.
She's keen on these things being decided at the UK level because it is for the moment run by a morally conservative government while Scotland and internationally to some extent are more progressive and not to her liking .
Well yes, but I'm perfectly willing to take her framework and run with it. I don't agree with her position on the axis and mine would be at the other end to hers, but I can use the concept of a humanist-posthumanist axis and use it for statistical purposes. For example "Party X scores 9 on the suthoritarian axis and 1 on the transhuman axis, so person Y who wants abortion to be banned will vote for Party X". From my POV it's another tool in the box
But we can develop tools in a more data-driven way. Ask people a bunch of questions and then do a factor analysis (or PCA) to determine axes.
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
I mean, the Tories are doing so badly that I could believe Plaid Cymru GAIN Guildford.
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
Interesting article. Viewcode is to be commended on a thought-provoking post.
Ultimately I'm a classical liberal in the sense that we have primarily self-regarding actions and primarily other-regarding actions. And it's nobody's bloody business what self-regarding actions I do.
So if I want to take HRT to become more feminine, that's really nobody's business but my own. Ditto, if I want to take testosterone and get swole, that's my business. It only really becomes somebody else's business if I decide to enter a weightlifting competition, the tour de france, etc.
The same goes for drugs like cocaine. If I decide to ingest it, that's my business, not the state's. Yes, other people are impacted - but those are largely a consequence of the effects of prohibition creating a black market cornered by gangsters, not the act of taking the drug itself. If I get coked up and go to the footy and get in a fight, that's different.
My point is that I do think this is a stance that should be covered by libertarian or classically liberal principles, which is why it strikes me as so odd that "the right" seems to come down on the humanist rather than transhumanist side. Does this mean it should be treated as a separate political axis? I'm not sure. I find it hard to separate my transhumanist position from my classically liberal position, the two are intertwined to the point they are the same thing. However, it's clear from the general discourse that this isn't the case in society at large - there are a lot of people who are very keen on a small state and lower taxes, but still happy to police other people's bodies. I find their position logically incoherent. "Biopolitics" shouldn't be conducted at the national level, they should be conducted at the individual level. A human being should be sovereign over their own body.
‘Humanist’ is an odd choice of term for opposition to the ‘transhumanist’ stance, given many of the positions viewcode describes are rooted in traditional religious belief.
Humanism is, of course, a philosophy which has been around for a very long time, and even without the poaching of the term whose definition would be hard to reach a consensus over.
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
So, is there anything that can be done to reform capitalism to stop this all-too-frequent tale?
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
Why?
The previous one, of Great Britain and Ireland, was evidently not worth saving.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the previous one.
Nor was the state of England [and Wales].
Because, after much fussing and shouting and killing, we seem to have arrived at something that works. Despite all the arguments NI and Scotland are still in the UK, and Wales solved the problem by leaving but never telling anybody. It would cost too much money and time to change, so let's not. NI can leave when it wants but provided we don't force it out we should be OK.
But on precisely that argument, CR would insist on using whatever measures he saw necessary to preserve UKGBNI just because it was the current state. He wouldn't dream of letting [edit] NI leave, any more than our Tories would permit an indyref again.
Another Indyref should happen again if there is a nationalist Scottish administration that is elected on such a manifesto, and if a generation (reasonably defined as 25 years) has passed since the last one.
How long did the Thatcherite generation last? How long did the New Labour generation last?
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
I think we should demand he change his name before he damages the Welsh by association.
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
So, is there anything that can be done to reform capitalism to stop this all-too-frequent tale?
Have engineers rather than bean counters at the top of engineering companies.
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
So, is there anything that can be done to reform capitalism to stop this all-too-frequent tale?
We’ve moved on from capitalism to oligopoly; it’s just that not everyone has noticed.
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
There was a Plaid Cymru candidate in Maidenhead in 1979.
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
I read that article this morning. Big Rish sounds like he is completely lost and the tories will try to icepick his cranium after the inevitable May 2nd debacle. To be replaced by a Patel/Mourdant cheeky girls anti-immigration dream ticket apparently.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
Perhaps.
We are entering an age in which modifications of humans will, one by one, bring to life science fiction.
Not all of these modifications will be endorsed by progressives, automatically.
Consider some *existing* moral issues
1) selecting the sex of your child. Is it ok to abort all females? To select only male embryos for IVF implantation? 2) technology is already reaching towards the blind seeing and the dead hearing on a wide scale basis. Consider those in the deaf and blind community who say that this is a cultural extinction of their existence. See also physical disabilities. 3) pre birth genetic screening finds more and more things. What is it ok to abort for? The same is beginning to show up in IVF. 4) parents dosing their children with various things to make them better sportspeople.
Consider some science fiction that is just down the road -
A) pre birth selection of your child with all the desirable genetic characteristics. Remember that one doctor (at least) had a go at this, already. Consider the fun from inheritable changes. B )post birth modification of children - “Johnny was not quite what we wanted. So we had him made over as a blue eyed, blond Aryan.” C )cybernetics is on the way. Consider Bud from The Diamond Age.
Very interesting article @viewcode that I had to read a couple of times to digest. I am just not that sure that we should ultimately accept that these issues are categorised this way. For instance the debate about 'puberty blockers' seems to be more to do with the agency of children rather than how the state intervenes with bodies?
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
I read that article this morning. Big Rish sounds like he is completely lost and the tories will try to icepick his cranium after the inevitable May 2nd debacle. To be replaced by a Patel/Mourdant cheeky girls anti-immigration dream ticket apparently.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
Sounds about OK. Your disparaging comments about her medal appropriation aside, PM is fine. She should have some things she wants to do as leader (if she doesn't after all the leadership elections she's been in God help us all), and a good idea of what can be achieved in the little time that remains. Patel shores up the right flank a bit.
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
There was a Plaid Cymru candidate in Maidenhead in 1979.
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
I read that article this morning. Big Rish sounds like he is completely lost and the tories will try to icepick his cranium after the inevitable May 2nd debacle. To be replaced by a Patel/Mourdant cheeky girls anti-immigration dream ticket apparently.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
Sounds about OK. Your disparaging comments about her medal appropriation aside, PM is fine. She should have some things she wants to do as leader (if she doesn't after all the leadership elections she's been in God help us all), and a good idea of what can be achieved in the little time that remains. Patel shores up the right flank a bit.
Mordaunt is suspected of being insufficiently belligerent toward trans people for tory tastes so Patel balances the ticket because nobody is under any doubt that at her core is a black torrent of spite that springs from Avernus itself.
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
There was a Plaid Cymru candidate in Maidenhead in 1979.
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Omg, you went to desborough?
No, but John O'Farrell did and commented, 'Still, at least I got my deposit back which is more than can be said for the Plaid Cymru candidate who made the early tactical mistake of standing in a school that was not in Wales.'
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
I read that article this morning. Big Rish sounds like he is completely lost and the tories will try to icepick his cranium after the inevitable May 2nd debacle. To be replaced by a Patel/Mourdant cheeky girls anti-immigration dream ticket apparently.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
Sounds about OK. Your disparaging comments about her medal appropriation aside, PM is fine. She should have some things she wants to do as leader (if she doesn't after all the leadership elections she's been in God help us all), and a good idea of what can be achieved in the little time that remains. Patel shores up the right flank a bit.
Mordaunt is suspected of being insufficiently belligerent toward trans people for tory tastes so Patel balances the ticket because nobody is under any doubt that at her core is a black torrent of spite that springs from Avernus itself.
Not the way I'd put it, but yes.
It sounds quite Boris-y too. Bojo will be selected for a seat if he wants one if this is the leadership set up.
Let's take the idea of vaccines. Are vaccines a post humanist/trans humanist improvement of the body? I think that if you regard contraception as trans humanist then they must be. Is she seriously arguing that conservatives should be opposed to vaccines? Because if she is, and we have heard some of this nonsense in the US, not least from RFK, she's lost me and, I hope, most rational people.
Is genetic medicine treating hereditary disorders something we are supposed to oppose? I mean, really?
Or is this supposed axis just not very useful in making sensible decisions about the complicated questions we actually face? That's where I am heading.
Let's take the issue of transgender (hang in there, this will be brief). The issue there is surely not whether some people want to dress as the opposite sex. Good luck to them. Who cares? The State, and anybody even vaguely sane, only shows an interest when the rights that they are asserting interfere with the rights of others or puts them at unacceptable risk. That is the battlefield, not some deontological analysis of what we "ought" to be.
Your last paragraph is absolutely spot on
At its core democracy is simply a mechanism for resolving disputes without violence. It works more often than not.
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
There was a Plaid Cymru candidate in Maidenhead in 1979.
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Omg, you went to desborough?
No, but John O'Farrell did and commented, 'Still, at least I got my deposit back which is more than can be said for the Plaid Cymru candidate who made the early tactical mistake of standing in a school that was not in Wales.'
OIC, I taught there, late 80s. It was after o Farrell though.
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
2) technology is already reaching towards the blind seeing and the dead hearing on a wide scale basis.
Errrrrr, I think I missed that technological advance!
Tories sending out a survey to voters in Guildford. Obviously a central office document but with appropriate name and pictures of the MP added as it asks how you voted last time and how you intend to vote this time and one of the options is Plaid Cymru.
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Perhaps there has been a huge influx of Welsh people into Guildford since 2019? They would have been able to vote Plaid.
There was a Plaid Cymru candidate in Maidenhead in 1979.
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Omg, you went to desborough?
No, but John O'Farrell did and commented, 'Still, at least I got my deposit back which is more than can be said for the Plaid Cymru candidate who made the early tactical mistake of standing in a school that was not in Wales.'
OIC, I taught there, late 80s. It was after o Farrell though.
I was at Newent. Which as @Leon would tell you, is the bright centre of the universe.
(I've got a feeling I've left a word out somewhere, but I can't think what it is. Something to do with Alexander and Gordian, perhaps?)
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
2) technology is already reaching towards the blind seeing and the dead hearing on a wide scale basis.
Errrrrr, I think I missed that technological advance!
Reading that article, then looking briefly into the speaker, and it’s clear she’s just giving a pseudo-philosophical veneer to very old, religious, conservative and highly American opinions.
American religious conservatives don’t like abortion, contraception, vaccines, queers, and a variety of other things that challenge traditional society and morals. That’s all.
Though the one thing that’s much more British than American - simply because it suits the right in this milieu - is to insist decisions should be made at national level. That’s because they suspect devolved administrations and supranational organisations of being woke. But transport this discussion to America and hey presto, suddenly deciding things at state level is fine and federal decisions like Roe vs Wade are anathema.
That’s not correct though. The UK is a unitary state that has devolved power.
The US is a federal structure in which the states are pre-eminent and they have chosen to cede some powers to a coordinating central body.
The clue is in the names:
The United Kingdom is single. There is only one Kingdom. Prior to the formation of the UK you had a personal union of crowns but separate counties (hence the English Civil War being only part of the War of the Three Kingdoms)
The United States is plural: it is the individual states acting in unity.
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
I don't think this is much new - just a new type of polish on the same old theology/ideology.
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
2) technology is already reaching towards the blind seeing and the dead hearing on a wide scale basis.
Errrrrr, I think I missed that technological advance!
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
I don't think there's much chance of her being a winning PM, just maybe not losing by as much as feared. No, if she became Tory leader it would just be the Tories trying to fool the electorate that they haven't moved too far to the right. I don't think that would work.
The coalition of voters Labour won in 1997 is still out there (says the Times), who knew?
Although any voter under 45 couldn't have been in the coalition of voters that Labour won in 1997, most voters who were at or above retirement age in 1997 are no longer with us, and the priorities of individuals will have moved on (the young New Labour voter is deep into middle age, the middle aged one is retired etc). Meanwhile, the world is similar to 1997 in certain respects, but different in others.
I get the broad point being made, but it does slightly gloss over the passage of time.
An interesting piece, thanks. It's interesting to see someone on the right arguing that issues like abortion shouldn't be decided at a subnational level, given that the US debate has the right arguing the precise opposite! I wonder whether there may be some self interest at play here? I'm suspicious of attempts to create a grand narrative around quite complex and nuanced issues, it feels like a recipe for authoritarianism and bad law. If you can't do anything to alter the human body, what about heart surgery, or IVF, or body piercings or tattoos? People who think the state has no business making sure that kids aren't going to bed hungry but want it interfering in every kind of way in their personal choices worry me.
The federal US and the UK are fundamentally different constructs with different powers and responsibilities. You shouldn’t conflate them
That doesn't matter. If she loses her seat, the tories have lost the election by a lolsome margin anyway so who gives a fuck.
She is more fluent liar than Sunak but is crippled by the burden of a self-serving vanity of leonesque proportions so, on balance, probably a better campaigner but worse PM than our cashew dicked incumbent.
Two mega-polls that have thickened the miasma of doom enveloping the Conservatives by suggesting they could be heading for a defeat as calamitous, and possibly even more catastrophic, than the one they experienced 27 years ago.
It is scary for Tory MPs that their party languishes so far behind in the headline polls; it is even more terrifying to be told that they are individually fated to be felled. The YouGov projection, published last week, has the Tories plunging to just 155 MPs.
There’s a consolation that the prime minister and his people cling to. This is the notion that many voters who are presently saying they are undecided will end up plumping for the Tories come election day. Yet most of the pollsters already factor in an assumption that Don’t Knows who were Conservative supporters in 2019 are more likely to break to the Tories when we get to the crunch. If that assumption is faulty or exaggerated, then the pollsters may not be being too harsh about Tory prospects, but too generous.
If Sir Keir Starmer is truly on course for a super-majority, it would look even more impressive for being such a remarkable turnaround from Labour’s result in 2019, its worst since 1935. A Labour super-majority won’t mean an easy life for a Starmer government. It will still have to grapple with a grim inheritance. Having a lot of Labour MPs won’t magically lift the rate of economic growth or instantly repair ravaged public services.
Many of the Blair generation, including the man himself, would now say that they wasted time in their early period in office. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher, though her 1979 majority was much more modest, quickly got cracking with her radical right revolution.
There’s a moral here for Sir Keir and his putative cabinet. When it comes to majorities, it is not so much the size that counts as what you do with it.
Far be it from me to disagree with Andrew Rawnsley but that's a selective re-telling of history.
The 1979 and 1997 experiences were very different - 1979 was more like 1945, there was a general recognition the way things had been done (call it the post-war concensus or Butskellism if you prefer) had failed, The previous winter with its dreadful images of uncollected rubbish and even unburied dead brought home to many the failure of a political system which had allowed untramelled trade union power to run amok leaving the elected Government politically impotent. Margaret Thatcher offered a watered down version of the 1970 Manifesto but this time many more people were willing to listen after the following years of strikes and industrial/civil unrest.
1997 was the opposite - most people were broadly happy with the post-Thatcher social democratic concensus and Blair won, not by offering anything new or radical but simply by promising to run the current system better and cleaner than the Conservatives who had reached political collapse through division, dogma and drift (as Mandelson would have put it).
2024 is somewhere between the two - there's a recognition the current way of doing things doesn't work for a number of people but not to the extent of 1979. No one is offering any radical solutions and no one seems to want them. Starmer is basically offering to manage the decline better and cleaner than the Conservatives.
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
You'd have to change the rule book for that to happen.
Let's take the idea of vaccines. Are vaccines a post humanist/trans humanist improvement of the body? I think that if you regard contraception as trans humanist then they must be. Is she seriously arguing that conservatives should be opposed to vaccines? Because if she is, and we have heard some of this nonsense in the US, not least from RFK, she's lost me and, I hope, most rational people.
Is genetic medicine treating hereditary disorders something we are supposed to oppose? I mean, really?
Or is this supposed axis just not very useful in making sensible decisions about the complicated questions we actually face? That's where I am heading.
Let's take the issue of transgender (hang in there, this will be brief). The issue there is surely not whether some people want to dress as the opposite sex. Good luck to them. Who cares? The State, and anybody even vaguely sane, only shows an interest when the rights that they are asserting interfere with the rights of others or puts them at unacceptable risk. That is the battlefield, not some deontological analysis of what we "ought" to be.
Your last paragraph is absolutely spot on
At its core democracy is simply a mechanism for resolving disputes without violence. It works more often than not.
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals.
If only. It actually boils down to competing ideologies. I know which side I'm on in that battle, but I would never have chosen to fight it. It does no-one any good.
Ever opened a tin of dog or cat food and thought “that smells and looks really good. I’d love to taste it but the pet food taboo prohibits me from doing so”?
Then wing your way over to Carrefour (or Auchan, or E Leclerc, Intermarché, Super-U or wherever) and buy a big tin of “cassoulet toulousain”. It’s tonight’s dinner. Yum.
Seattle Times - Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
So, is there anything that can be done to reform capitalism to stop this all-too-frequent tale?
We’ve moved on from capitalism to oligopoly; it’s just that not everyone has noticed.
It’s actually an old old tale. The company (and industry) moved from the originators to the Proper Managers. Who deprecate wasting money on quality, workforce skills and new technology. In favour of Proper Management.
Sometime little time later, the remains of the company are an industrial museum, visited by @JosiasJessop and @Sunil_Prasannan.
1) if you do something every damn day, it is your core business. 2) your product will become obsolete. Either you an own the successor. Or someone else will. 3) a reputation for quality takes decades to build. It can be lost in an afternoon. 4) if you are in business to make money, you will end up losing money. If you are in business to make a product at a quality and price the market wants, you will make money.
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
You'd have to change the rule book for that to happen.
Not really, she could resign and commit to standing again.
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
I don't think there's much chance of her being a winning PM, just maybe not losing by as much as feared. No, if she became Tory leader it would just be the Tories trying to fool the electorate that they haven't moved too far to the right. I don't think that would work.
I disagree, I think it would be the Tories desperately trying to avoid a wipe-out and believing (rightly imo) that Mordaunt has enough about her to achieve that.
I also suspect that she will hold her seat regardless, and definitely hold it as Tory leader and PM.
Sure she would be very unlikely to remain as PM after the GE but I believe she would do well enough to continue as LOTO and, barring major mishaps, lead them into a 2028/9 GE.
Ther Tories should really dump Sunak and select Mordaunt. I hope they don't.
Let's take the idea of vaccines. Are vaccines a post humanist/trans humanist improvement of the body? I think that if you regard contraception as trans humanist then they must be. Is she seriously arguing that conservatives should be opposed to vaccines? Because if she is, and we have heard some of this nonsense in the US, not least from RFK, she's lost me and, I hope, most rational people.
Is genetic medicine treating hereditary disorders something we are supposed to oppose? I mean, really?
Or is this supposed axis just not very useful in making sensible decisions about the complicated questions we actually face? That's where I am heading.
Let's take the issue of transgender (hang in there, this will be brief). The issue there is surely not whether some people want to dress as the opposite sex. Good luck to them. Who cares? The State, and anybody even vaguely sane, only shows an interest when the rights that they are asserting interfere with the rights of others or puts them at unacceptable risk. That is the battlefield, not some deontological analysis of what we "ought" to be.
Your last paragraph is absolutely spot on
At its core democracy is simply a mechanism for resolving disputes without violence. It works more often than not.
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals.
If only. It actually boils down to competing ideologies. I know which side I'm on in that battle, but I would never have chosen to fight it. It does no-one any good.
It’s been seized by ideologues but that’s not the same thing.
Take the example of women’s refuges: does a physical male who identifies as female have the right to enter because they are deemed female? Do the women who are currently there have the right to an environment free from the presence of a physical male?
That’s a straight conflict between the rights of two individuals
That doesn't matter. If she loses her seat, the tories have lost the election by a lolsome margin anyway so who gives a fuck.
She is more fluent liar than Sunak but is crippled by the burden of a self-serving vanity of leonesque proportions so, on balance, probably a better campaigner but worse PM than our cashew dicked incumbent.
OK, I see your argument. She would be a better campaigner so could limit the Tory losses, and it doesn't matter that she may well lose her seat. Also the pressure to call a GE may be so great that she could take Liz Truss's crown as shortest serving PM?
Very interesting piece. I find the 'nation state' emphasis rather odd. Why as a matter of principle should something as fundamental as this be handled at the level of something that is at heart an artificial construct?
All forms of human organisation are artificial.
Indeed: there will come a time when the last human to ever utter the words "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" will pass.
It's a reminder to spend our time working for what matters, what brings joy and happiness.
Or to work to ensure it never does - because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a project worth saving.
It's unusual to be 20 minutes into the article and nobody commentating. I hope I haven't scared anybody off.
No, I was writing something myself (not for PB) but have stopped for some of Mrs C's mum's banana cake and a cup of tea, now I have the piece sorted out as to argument etc.
Interesting piece. Everything from wearing spectacles and earring piercings to chopping off and frying one's own bits for a dinner party.
Though I'm not sure humanist is the right root word to use. Too many meanings, e.g. it tends to be used as an opposite to sectarian authoritarian. Is it too late for some other word to be found?
Probably. I don't know if the mods would permit a post facto change.
I am busy tonight and will not have time to rewrite. However there's usually an extended cut of the articles I write and a backstage discussion. If people can suggest alternates to "humanist" I'm happy to include them in the later version.
I was thinking Naturalist, but that has been taken by people interested in nature.
They can't use Naturist, as that has been taken by people who enjoy going around nude.
Mordaunt who as far as I can see would naturally probably bring the silly culture wars to an end is held as being "too woke", despite not being woke at all.
It's unusual to be 20 minutes into the article and nobody commentating. I hope I haven't scared anybody off.
No, I was writing something myself (not for PB) but have stopped for some of Mrs C's mum's banana cake and a cup of tea, now I have the piece sorted out as to argument etc.
Interesting piece. Everything from wearing spectacles and earring piercings to chopping off and frying one's own bits for a dinner party.
Though I'm not sure humanist is the right root word to use. Too many meanings, e.g. it tends to be used as an opposite to sectarian authoritarian. Is it too late for some other word to be found?
Probably. I don't know if the mods would permit a post facto change.
I am busy tonight and will not have time to rewrite. However there's usually an extended cut of the articles I write and a backstage discussion. If people can suggest alternates to "humanist" I'm happy to include them in the later version.
I was thinking Naturalist, but that has been taken by people interested in nature.
They can't use Naturist, as that has been taken by people who enjoy going around nude.
She could hardly be dumped as winning PM could she? And if she loses the election, what does it matter to the electorate how the Tory party deals with her?
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
You'd have to change the rule book for that to happen.
Not really, she could resign and commit to standing again.
A Leader resigning from the Leadership of the Party is not eligible for re-nomination in the consequent Leadership election
Constitution of the Conservative Party, Schedule 2, Article 2, page 18.
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
I read that article this morning. Big Rish sounds like he is completely lost and the tories will try to icepick his cranium after the inevitable May 2nd debacle. To be replaced by a Patel/Mourdant cheeky girls anti-immigration dream ticket apparently.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
Sounds about OK. Your disparaging comments about her medal appropriation aside, PM is fine. She should have some things she wants to do as leader (if she doesn't after all the leadership elections she's been in God help us all), and a good idea of what can be achieved in the little time that remains. Patel shores up the right flank a bit.
Patel stiffens the support on the right. Penny stiffens up the centre.
Comments
I get the broad point being made, but it does slightly gloss over the passage of time.
I always roll my eyes involuntarily when someone portentously announces 'moving on from neoliberalism'. One doesn’t move on from the immutable truths of how economies work, any more than one moves on from breathing, but one can get worse or better at it, depending on which blockages and restrictions the system operates under.
I hope and believe that the UK is not entering a prolonged era of the morbidly obese state choking what's left of the economy, despite the two main parties providing plenty of reasons for pessimism.
Will those 4 lost points by Liverpool lose them the title?
*NB: not suggested for the obvious reason, but because AIUI it is often given to children who are merely short, not for any real medical reason. Unless social norms and parental demands are a medical reason?
In the end some people will always be scared of anything that is not exactly like them. Some people will always want the state to stop people doing anything that they dislike. Some people will want to re-frame those attitudes as defence of something 'precious'. The market place of ideas should, of course, be restricted only to those that are pre-approved by their particular political bias/theology.
Its not just the Right of course. However, in this case it clearly is.
It seems appropriate given how many times these ideas have been recycled and rebadged that the header was written with the assistance of AI.
Despite all of the above its always useful to hear what the new 'buzzwords' are!
Of course in Scotland we have a political party* dedicated to preserving their idea of the family, though against the depredations of the devolved Scottish government rather than the benevolent unitary state of the UK.
*When I say a political party I mean a pressure group that gets attention by making a lot noise rather than actually persuading people to vote for them.
I'm suspicious of attempts to create a grand narrative around quite complex and nuanced issues, it feels like a recipe for authoritarianism and bad law. If you can't do anything to alter the human body, what about heart surgery, or IVF, or body piercings or tattoos? People who think the state has no business making sure that kids aren't going to bed hungry but want it interfering in every kind of way in their personal choices worry me.
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/0a992805-7d05-4bcd-abd4-15e5770cdf9f/downloads/Author Guidelines.pdf?ver=1711453665912
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/07/unpaid-carers-allowance-payment-prosecution-earnings-rules
How long did the New Labour generation last?
A snip from Viewcode's interesting article:
In contradistinction to this is the other side: the “humanist” belief that technology should be constrained to only restore the body to its normative state: repair, not enhance.
Would that it were so simple - trad people who want technology to heal, restore, make good and normalise; OTOH those who want to use technology to abolish death, age, IQ limits and so on.
Absolute nonsense. The truth lies in a very muddled middle. The state of nature - human normality - is one in which we are by nature massively prone to die of deadly infectious diseases, most children die young, many women die in childbirth, those who survive have 15 children of which about 2 or 3 on average survive. Nature is horrible.
It is amazing and wonderful that we can artificially ensure our children don't die of smallpox and 30 other deadly diseases, and that few women die in childbirth. This is not a return to or restoration of nature but a triumph over them.
I would be one of the those people tending to regard aspects of the body as precious, but I have no interest in dictating my own idea of this to everyone via the state. Instead, I would want personal liberty and freedom for anyone seeking it, from either a totalising materialism and techno-futurism on the one hand, or state-decreed limits, or authoritarianism on the other.
NY Magazine - Lauren Boebert Is Still on Her Worst Behavior
By Matt Stieb, Intelligencer staff writer - When people experience a moment of public embarrassment for which they are at fault, it sometimes motivates them to change their behavior. Representative Lauren Boebert has not gone this route. Three months after she was kicked out of a theater for vaping in front of a pregnant woman and getting handsy with her date, CNN reports that she had a little too much fun at the New York Young Republican Club’s annual holiday gala.
During the party, held at Cipriani Wall Street, waitstaff reportedly cut Boebert off after a long night of drinking, with one source at the event telling CNN that a “server told the congresswoman they believed she had been overserved.” Boebert (who has met Donald Trump many times) then kept trying to take selfies with the former president, who was seated at her table. It reportedly got so bad that Trump’s security pulled her aside and asked her to please stop.
Like any seasoned partyer, Boebert knew what to do next: relocate to a different bar. Despite the behavior check at the cavernous downtown restaurant, photos from that night show Boebert going uptown to an after-party with George Santos at the conservative hot spot Beach Café on the Upper East Side.
Boebert, who is currently recovering from an emergency surgery for a blood clot in her leg, is facing tough election prospects after switching districts in pursuit of an easier route back to Congress. Thankfully, though, her behavior at the holiday party did not affect her standing within the Republican party. Last month, Trump endorsed her as a “trusted America first fighter.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/lauren-boebert-drank-too-much-at-trump-christmas-party.html
SSI - Not sure just HOW this fits in with vc's interesting posting, except to note that "enhanced" may or may NOT be fit description of Rep. LB (R-Screw Loose).
That is assuming Plaid Cymru aren't getting overly ambitious.
Interestingly Scottish Nationalist weren't included (I assume because they are a separate party)
Just trying to understand some of the context of it.
Humanism is, of course, a philosophy which has been around for a very long time, and even without the poaching of the term whose definition would be hard to reach a consensus over.
@TomABacon
Today's Times contains some very important, and illuminating, quotes on Rishi Sunak. I'm not always a huge fan of Tim Shipman's columns - they focus too much on the Westminster "games" rather than policy - but this week's has some really useful nuggets. 🧵
https://twitter.com/TomABacon/status/1776953551316521349
Telegraph - The ‘reactionary feminist’ who rails against progress – and the pill
In her provocative new book Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington takes a torch to every feminist sacred cow
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/reactionary-feminist-who-rails-against-progress-pill/
With (perhaps) English Tory candidates NOT having sense enough - or (maybe) being unable to - remove the PC option?
Two mega-polls that have thickened the miasma of doom enveloping the Conservatives by suggesting they could be heading for a defeat as calamitous, and possibly even more catastrophic, than the one they experienced 27 years ago.
It is scary for Tory MPs that their party languishes so far behind in the headline polls; it is even more terrifying to be told that they are individually fated to be felled. The YouGov projection, published last week, has the Tories plunging to just 155 MPs.
There’s a consolation that the prime minister and his people cling to. This is the notion that many voters who are presently saying they are undecided will end up plumping for the Tories come election day. Yet most of the pollsters already factor in an assumption that Don’t Knows who were Conservative supporters in 2019 are more likely to break to the Tories when we get to the crunch. If that assumption is faulty or exaggerated, then the pollsters may not be being too harsh about Tory prospects, but too generous.
If Sir Keir Starmer is truly on course for a super-majority, it would look even more impressive for being such a remarkable turnaround from Labour’s result in 2019, its worst since 1935. A Labour super-majority won’t mean an easy life for a Starmer government. It will still have to grapple with a grim inheritance. Having a lot of Labour MPs won’t magically lift the rate of economic growth or instantly repair ravaged public services.
Many of the Blair generation, including the man himself, would now say that they wasted time in their early period in office. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher, though her 1979 majority was much more modest, quickly got cracking with her radical right revolution.
There’s a moral here for Sir Keir and his putative cabinet. When it comes to majorities, it is not so much the size that counts as what you do with it.
Interesting ; some things that I think are total nonsense, and some which deserve further consideration, particularly on the current wave of ideology regarding the body as malleable "meat lego." A relief to hear that the Telegraph is still occasionally taking a break from printing total undifferentiated and jingoistic rubbish these days, and some curate's eggs articles are still in it.
That aside, I don't see it as a useful axis or concept. It isn't remarkable to be pro abortion and anti-Transgender, or pro cosmetic surgery such as tooth whitening while anti- assisted suicide.
by Dominic Gates, Seattle Times aerospace reporter - The intense backlash against Boeing after the near catastrophe aboard an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January wasn’t a reaction to an isolated manufacturing error but to a yearslong decline of safety standards.
The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.
“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”
To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”
Today Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting that this shareholders-first, cut-costs, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. But, for two decades, it worked.
Boeing’s leaders delivered gushers of cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends — $68 billion since 2010, according to Melius Research — rather than investing in future all-new airplanes.
To ensure they beat Wall Street projections every quarter, Boeing boosted the stock price with accounting tricks, such as pulling forward airline cash advances.
Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet’s wings to Japan.
They moved work away from Boeing’s highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere.
They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all this, from the early 2000s on, Boeing’s leadership emulated corporate America’s then most lionized and influential boss: Jack Welch, General Electric’s hard-edged CEO in the 1980s and ’90s.
Seattle-area Boeing employees and retirees have long complained about the negative cultural impact of the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. That swept in former 25-year GE veteran Harry Stonecipher to run things, the first in a train of executive leaders who had worked under and sought to imitate Welch as cold, imperial CEOs.
These Welch acolytes treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing’s essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes. . . .
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/peak-political-podcast-rest-is-politics-news-agents-b1149671.html
Well, in the Desborough School mock elections of that year, anyway.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be a semi-literate 68 year old GB News watching gammon with a fat neck was very heaven.
We are entering an age in which modifications of humans will, one by one, bring to life science fiction.
Not all of these modifications will be endorsed by progressives, automatically.
Consider some *existing* moral issues
1) selecting the sex of your child. Is it ok to abort all females? To select only male embryos for IVF implantation?
2) technology is already reaching towards the blind seeing and the dead hearing on a wide scale basis. Consider those in the deaf and blind community who say that this is a cultural extinction of their existence. See also physical disabilities.
3) pre birth genetic screening finds more and more things. What is it ok to abort for? The same is beginning to show up in IVF.
4) parents dosing their children with various things to make them better sportspeople.
Consider some science fiction that is just down the road -
A) pre birth selection of your child with all the desirable genetic characteristics. Remember that one doctor (at least) had a go at this, already. Consider the fun from inheritable changes.
B )post birth modification of children - “Johnny was not quite what we wanted. So we had him made over as a blue eyed, blond Aryan.”
C )cybernetics is on the way. Consider Bud from The Diamond Age.
She might be one of the only ones to hold out, because she's popular locally, and is local.
It sounds quite Boris-y too. Bojo will be selected for a seat if he wants one if this is the leadership set up.
But I suspect she would poll better than Sunak . Positives are her magnificent hair , she did the sword thing and looked good in that outfit .
Policy wise I don’t think it really matters . She’s not Sunak and that helps her .
At one point I thought there was no chance of Sunak being dumped before the GE but think there’s a better chance now .
At its core democracy is simply a mechanism for resolving disputes without violence. It works more often than not.
The whole trans debate boils down to a debate about conflicting rights between different individuals
(I've got a feeling I've left a word out somewhere, but I can't think what it is. Something to do with Alexander and Gordian, perhaps?)
https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/politics/poll-predicts-loss-of-conservative-portsmouth-north-seat-in-the-general-election-4478859
Would the electorate believe that should she survive she wouldn't be dumped by the Conservative Party (let's face it, it has form) after the election for somebody more right wing?
The US is a federal structure in which the states are pre-eminent and they have chosen to cede some powers to a coordinating central body.
The clue is in the names:
The United Kingdom is single. There is only one Kingdom. Prior to the formation of the UK you had a personal union of crowns but separate counties (hence the English Civil War being only part of the War of the Three Kingdoms)
The United States is plural: it is the individual states acting in unity.
She should commit to putting herself up for re-election should she lose anyway.
Not that deep!
😳
She is more fluent liar than Sunak but is crippled by the burden of a self-serving vanity of leonesque proportions so, on balance, probably a better campaigner but worse PM than our cashew dicked incumbent.
The 1979 and 1997 experiences were very different - 1979 was more like 1945, there was a general recognition the way things had been done (call it the post-war concensus or Butskellism if you prefer) had failed, The previous winter with its dreadful images of uncollected rubbish and even unburied dead brought home to many the failure of a political system which had allowed untramelled trade union power to run amok leaving the elected Government politically impotent. Margaret Thatcher offered a watered down version of the 1970 Manifesto but this time many more people were willing to listen after the following years of strikes and industrial/civil unrest.
1997 was the opposite - most people were broadly happy with the post-Thatcher social democratic concensus and Blair won, not by offering anything new or radical but simply by promising to run the current system better and cleaner than the Conservatives who had reached political collapse through division, dogma and drift (as Mandelson would have put it).
2024 is somewhere between the two - there's a recognition the current way of doing things doesn't work for a number of people but not to the extent of 1979. No one is offering any radical solutions and no one seems to want them. Starmer is basically offering to manage the decline better and cleaner than the Conservatives.
She might be willing to do that, or she might not. If she's popular locally, she might fancy her chances more after the election.
If only. It actually boils down to competing ideologies. I know which side I'm on in that battle, but I would never have chosen to fight it. It does no-one any good.
Then wing your way over to Carrefour (or Auchan, or E Leclerc, Intermarché, Super-U or wherever) and buy a big tin of “cassoulet toulousain”. It’s tonight’s dinner. Yum.
Sometime little time later, the remains of the company are an industrial museum, visited by @JosiasJessop and @Sunil_Prasannan.
1) if you do something every damn day, it is your core business.
2) your product will become obsolete. Either you an own the successor. Or someone else will.
3) a reputation for quality takes decades to build. It can be lost in an afternoon.
4) if you are in business to make money, you will end up losing money. If you are in business to make a product at a quality and price the market wants, you will make money.
I also suspect that she will hold her seat regardless, and definitely hold it as Tory leader and PM.
Sure she would be very unlikely to remain as PM after the GE but I believe she would do well enough to continue as LOTO and, barring major mishaps, lead them into a 2028/9 GE.
Ther Tories should really dump Sunak and select Mordaunt. I hope they don't.
Take the example of women’s refuges: does a physical male who identifies as female have the right to enter because they are deemed female? Do the women who are currently there have the right to an environment free from the presence of a physical male?
That’s a straight conflict between the rights of two individuals
She would be a better campaigner so could limit the Tory losses, and it doesn't matter that she may well lose her seat.
Also the pressure to call a GE may be so great that she could take Liz Truss's crown as shortest serving PM?
They can't use Naturist, as that has been taken by people who enjoy going around nude.
How about Body Purists?
The Pure Body Movement. That kind of thing?
Constitution of the Conservative Party, Schedule 2, Article 2, page 18.