It's the whole We Woz Robbed shtick. The Tories didn't REALLY win. Dontchaknow.
Even when Tories win, Lefties can't accept that voters rejected them. It was all some terrible mistake - the voters were duped/stupid/one more push blah blah.
Mr. Jonathan, they won an outright majority after spending five years in the leading role of a coalition government. That's no small feat.
The left's approach of saying "Oh, but they didn't really win" is bizarre. I wonder what was being said here in 2005 after Labour got a lower share of the vote and a majority five times bigger.
No-one disputes that the Tories won a majority and that was an achievement.
But they are not popular.
Labour are clearly not popular as you rightly point out. But there is currently no danger of them thinking so. At present the Tories are the ones in danger of deluding themselves that they are popular.
That Venn diagram is a good example. The blue circle looks twice as big as the red circle.
* In truth, they are almost exactly the same size. * Together they make up just over half of those who vote and under half of those eligible to vote. * The black circle should include FB users and would be bigger than both.
* The blue circle should be 21.2% bigger than the red one, not almost exactly the same size. * Together they make up more than two thirds of voters, not just over half. 67.3% isn't a half. * If the black circle included Facebook users who post political stuff then it would still be small.
Turnout at GE2015 was 66% not 100%. As far as I am aware non voters can still use social media. Do correct me if I am wrong.
Tories got 24% of the electorate and Labour got 20%. That's not a massive difference in popularity, even if it leads to a massive difference in outcome under FPTP.
The point of the conversation is that when a political conversation happens in social media, party supporters are surprised at the negative response. I merely suggest that they should not be.
Where were you in 2005 when Labour won with 21.6% of the electorate vs 19.9% for the Tories. Out partying I suppose living the fact that the system has robbed the Tories of about 50 seats.
It's the whole We Woz Robbed shtick. The Tories didn't REALLY win. Dontchaknow.
Even when Tories win, Lefties can't accept that voters rejected them. It was all some terrible mistake - the voters were duped/stupid/one more push blah blah.
Mr. Jonathan, they won an outright majority after spending five years in the leading role of a coalition government. That's no small feat.
The left's approach of saying "Oh, but they didn't really win" is bizarre. I wonder what was being said here in 2005 after Labour got a lower share of the vote and a majority five times bigger.
No-one disputes that the Tories won a majority and that was an achievement.
But they are not popular.
Labour are clearly not popular as you rightly point out. But there is currently no danger of them thinking so. At present the Tories are the ones in danger of deluding themselves that they are popular.
.
Turnout at GE2015 was 66% not 100%. As far as I am aware non voters can still use social media. Do correct me if I am wrong.
Tories got 24% of the electorate and Labour got 20%. That's not a massive difference in popularity, even if it leads to a massive difference in outcome under FPTP.
The point of the conversation is that when a political conversation happens in social media, party supporters are surprised at the negative response. I merely suggest that they should not be.
Where were you in 2005 when Labour won with 21.6% of the electorate vs 19.9% for the Tories. Out partying I suppose living the fact that the system has robbed the Tories of about 50 seats.
Let's face it. If the Tories aren't 'popular', Labour are seriously fecking unpopular.
I was discussing what the priorities for this government should be over the next few years with a few people, Labour and Con. Housing came top unsurprisingly given that we're in London. Second was immigration reform and "sending those idiots on the boats back" was pretty much the settled view among both groups. Third, and this was the surprising one, was tackling obesity and public health in general. I think the news that kids are getting fat and the NHS is struggling under the strain of obesity related diseases and chronic illnesses has now reached an inflection point. I think there is a lot of mileage both politically and fiscally in getting fat people to slim down and basically forcing obese people into healthy diets in order to continue receiving free NHS treatment. We need to head off the explosion of obesity before we turn into the US with its stupid fat acceptance movement.
Mr. Jonathan, they won an outright majority after spending five years in the leading role of a coalition government. That's no small feat.
The left's approach of saying "Oh, but they didn't really win" is bizarre. I wonder what was being said here in 2005 after Labour got a lower share of the vote and a majority five times bigger.
No-one disputes that the Tories won a majority and that was an achievement.
But they are not popular.
Labour are clearly not popular as you rightly point out. But there is currently no danger of them thinking so. At present the Tories are the ones in danger of deluding themselves that they are popular.
That Venn diagram is a good example. The blue circle looks twice as big as the red circle.
* In truth, they are almost exactly the same size. * Together they make up just over half of those who vote and under half of those eligible to vote. * The black circle should include FB users and would be bigger than both.
* The blue circle should be 21.2% bigger than the red one, not almost exactly the same size. * Together they make up more than two thirds of voters, not just over half. 67.3% isn't a half. * If the black circle included Facebook users who post political stuff then it would still be small.
Turnout at GE2015 was 66% not 100%. As far as I am aware non voters can still use social media. Do correct me if I am wrong.
Tories got 24% of the electorate and Labour got 20%. That's not a massive difference in popularity, even if it leads to a massive difference in outcome under FPTP.
The point of the conversation is that when a political conversation happens in social media, party supporters are surprised at the negative response. I merely suggest that they should not be.
Where were you in 2005 when Labour won with 21.6% of the electorate vs 19.9% for the Tories. Out partying I suppose living the fact that the system has robbed the Tories of about 50 seats.
Advocating PR.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
You can't compare results under different electoral systems. As was noted in Patrick Wintour's Long Read on the Lib Dems yesterday, the idea of Blukip didn't take off because it wasn't a realistic possibility. If voters had feared that possibility, might some of the nervous wetter Conservative voters have headed elsewhere?
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Turnout at GE2015 was 66% not 100%. As far as I am aware non voters can still use social media. Do correct me if I am wrong.
Tories got 24% of the electorate and Labour got 20%. That's not a massive difference in popularity, even if it leads to a massive difference in outcome under FPTP.
The point of the conversation is that when a political conversation happens in social media, party supporters are surprised at the negative response. I merely suggest that they should not be.
Where were you in 2005 when Labour won with 21.6% of the electorate vs 19.9% for the Tories. Out partying I suppose living the fact that the system has robbed the Tories of about 50 seats.
Advocating PR.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
Quite. I wonder how loudly the PR advocates would be shouting today given that the result would almost certainly have been a Con/UKIP coalition.
Edit: @antifrank is of course right that people will behave differently under different systems of voting.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Good post.
I think that the Tories know that they are never going to be considered "cool", or liked. Their trump card is being able to persuade people that they are "Competent". As long as they hold on to that, then labour really do have a mountain to climb.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
One of the major points thus discussion is missing is the way the political parties *should* be using social media.
Instead of having supporters in an echo chamber that does nothing but reinforce current support, and perhaps even repel potential supporters, they should spend money targeting messages directly.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I think the Conservatives did some of this at the GE; I'm not sure Labour did. If they did it got swamped out by the other messages.
After all, that is they way Google, FB and Twitter all hope to make money. The only problem is that it costs, even if the poor man's approach, of getting supporters to spam messages, can be counter-productive.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
You can't compare results under different electoral systems. As was noted in Patrick Wintour's Long Read on the Lib Dems yesterday, the idea of Blukip didn't take off because it wasn't a realistic possibility. If voters had feared that possibility, might some of the nervous wetter Conservative voters have headed elsewhere?
Hmm true to some degree - I probably wouldn't have voted Green if it was actually going to count ^_~. They'd probably do better at the expense of Labour, mind.
One of the major points thus discussion is missing is the way the political parties *should* be using social media.
Instead of having supporters in an echo chamber that does nothing but reinforce current support, and perhaps even repel potential supporters, they should spend money targeting messages directly.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I think the Conservatives did some of this at the GE; I'm not sure Labour did. If they did it got swamped out by the other messages.
After all, that is they way Google, FB and Twitter all hope to make money. The only problem is that it costs, even if the poor man's approach, of getting supporters to spam messages, can be counter-productive.
One of Japan’s best-loved cats, who won the heart of the nation working as a stationmaster in a rural train station, has died and the funeral will be held this weekend. Tama, a 16-year-old calico cat, attracted thousands of tourists to tiny Kishi station in Wakayama prefecture after being appointed stationmaster in 2007.
Prior to her arrival, the regional railway line was losing money and the station had lost its last human employee the previous year.
Tama, who famously strolled around the station in her official railway cap uniform, quickly drew crowds of visitors, fuelling a thriving merchandising business and revitalising the local economy.
@Bond_James_Bond I agree to some extent. Certainly the behaviour of especially the richer demographic of lefties is pure hypocrisy and smacks of wanting to pull up the drawbridge behind themselves and their own children.
Compare the 2002 Countryside March to the average protest today. Police that day said there was no trouble at all bar a few lost children and a couple of drunks needing a pointer to the nearest station at the end. No desecration of war memorials, no cars keyed, no paint poured on buildings and no windows smashed. A jolly good day out for nearly half a million people.
One of Japan’s best-loved cats, who won the heart of the nation working as a stationmaster in a rural train station, has died and the funeral will be held this weekend. Tama, a 16-year-old calico cat, attracted thousands of tourists to tiny Kishi station in Wakayama prefecture after being appointed stationmaster in 2007.
Prior to her arrival, the regional railway line was losing money and the station had lost its last human employee the previous year.
Tama, who famously strolled around the station in her official railway cap uniform, quickly drew crowds of visitors, fuelling a thriving merchandising business and revitalising the local economy.
That's quite common; there was an Italian cat who would travel the railway network by jumping on and off trains, always finding her way back with a few exceptions. She was a celebrity as well;the railway gave her her own ticket.
Owney, posed here with a letter carrier, was a scruffy mutt who became a regular fixture at the Albany, New York, post office in 1888. His owner was likely a postal clerk who let the dog walk him to work. Owney was attracted to the texture or scent of the mailbags and when his master moved away, Owney stayed with his new mail clerk friends. He soon began to follow mailbags. At first, he followed them onto mail wagons and then onto mail trains. Owney began to ride with the bags on Railway Post Office (RPO) train cars across the state . . . and then the country! In 1895 Owney made an around-the-world trip, traveling with mailbags on trains and steamships to Asia and across Europe, before returning to Albany.
Railway mail clerks considered the dog a good luck charm. At a time when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode was ever in a wreck. The Railway mail clerks adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot, marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar. Each time Owney returned home to Albany, the clerks there saved the tags.
One of Japan’s best-loved cats, who won the heart of the nation working as a stationmaster in a rural train station, has died and the funeral will be held this weekend. Tama, a 16-year-old calico cat, attracted thousands of tourists to tiny Kishi station in Wakayama prefecture after being appointed stationmaster in 2007.
Prior to her arrival, the regional railway line was losing money and the station had lost its last human employee the previous year.
Tama, who famously strolled around the station in her official railway cap uniform, quickly drew crowds of visitors, fuelling a thriving merchandising business and revitalising the local economy.
That's quite common; there was an Italian cat who would travel the railway network by jumping on and off trains, always finding her way back with a few exceptions. She was a celebrity as well;the railway gave her her own ticket.
@Bond_James_Bond I agree to some extent. Certainly the behaviour of especially the richer demographic of lefties is pure hypocrisy and smacks of wanting to pull up the drawbridge behind themselves and their own children.
Compare the 2002 Countryside March to the average protest today. Police that day said there was no trouble at all bar a few lost children and a couple of drunks needing a pointer to the nearest station at the end. No desecration of war memorials, no cars keyed, no paint poured on buildings and no windows smashed. A jolly good day out for nearly half a million people.
Many on the Left would have considered it perfectly acceptable to see those marchers incarcerated for their 'crime'.
Some, I'm sure, would have thought it only correct if a few thousand or more were machine gunned, to encourage the others to rethink their views on hunting.
Awful. Real steps need to be taken across Europe against Muslim terrorists. Dave's speech was good but it is just words. François Hollande needs to get a grip as well.
Based on this reasoning, I was expecting the final result to be slightly more favourable to the Tories than the 2% lead which was my best estimate of what the polls were in aggregate showing: I posted here that I thought it would end up at around 36% Con, 32% Lab. In the event the Con figure was a smidgen higher and the Lab figure a smidgen lower than I'd expected. This, combined with the fact that the Conservatives did a superb targeting job, gave Cameron his narrow majority.
In other words, differential enthusiasm, not shy Tories.
Awful. Real steps need to be taken across Europe against Muslim terrorists. Dave's speech was good but it is just words. François Hollande needs to get a grip as well.
Based on this reasoning, I was expecting the final result to be slightly more favourable to the Tories than the 2% lead which was my best estimate of what the polls were in aggregate showing: I posted here that I thought it would end up at around 36% Con, 32% Lab. In the event the Con figure was a smidgen higher and the Lab figure a smidgen lower than I'd expected. This, combined with the fact that the Conservatives did a superb targeting job, gave Cameron his narrow majority.
In other words, differential enthusiasm, not shy Tories.
The opinions of non voters need to be ignored - they self selected not to be part of the choosing of the government.
Awful. Real steps need to be taken across Europe against Muslim terrorists. Dave's speech was good but it is just words. François Hollande needs to get a grip as well.
Awful. Real steps need to be taken across Europe against Muslim terrorists. Dave's speech was good but it is just words. François Hollande needs to get a grip as well.
Awful. Real steps need to be taken across Europe against Muslim terrorists. Dave's speech was good but it is just words. François Hollande needs to get a grip as well.
Hollande would rather the problem headed north to Calais, and hid on a truck.
I use Twitter as a useful source of information and follow a broad range of politicians, political commentators, party websites and political bloggers. In terms of Facebook, until last year I used it as a way of keeping up with family and friends. However in the run up to Indyref it became a tsunami of Yes/No posts which submerged the normal F&F content, as it was impossible to filter I don't think it had much impact on voting, most folks just switched of to it. There was a bit of resurgence on FB during GE2015.
With Indyref and GE2015 behind us, Its only the extremists on both sides of the Cyberwars who fight it out daily on Twitter/FB. The MSM chooses to only report about the nationalists and seems blinded to the fact that unionists are just as bad. I feeling is that there is a good argument for saying what is said on twitter should stay on twitter, unless it's criminal behaviour. As Sturgeon said she receives hundreds of abusive tweets but chooses to ignore them.
To get a feel for the Cyberwar being fought here's the best couple of sites to dip into:
There are many websites on both sides of the equation where these guys fight it out on a daily basis, each side gives as good as it gets. Check out Wings over Scotland, Smash the SNP, United Against Separation, SNPout, Tactical Voter etc.
I fear the EU REF CyberYes and CyberNo campaigns will make the above look like a minor skirmish. As the MSM will be split, as opposed to backing one side, I think this will turn very nasty.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I understand that, now that they are safely in power again, the Conservatives are cancelling the plans to upgrade the railways.
Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain. END-QUOTE
Another nice piece, the recent guest slots are really enriching the site. Personally, as one who is primarily a Facebook user, a slight surprise in these figures is how low the overall percentage of political comment is - weighting the Facebook block graph against voting share by eye, I can't be clear whether the overall percentage of political comment is reported just above or just below 10% of users. When I think of my friend list, none of whom I have friended through political association, I figure nearer 30% made political comments of some kind in the lead up to the general election and I was exposed to support for all the parties above except Plaid. Perhaps, as the large majority of my Facebook friends are city dwellers from various places, the bias in my own friend list is a metropolitan one and perhaps also the fact that a few of those friends were clustered around one particular very high-profile marginal seat in Sheffield Hallam (though I do not recall one direct reference to the contest itself) drove participation.
A few questions, what counts as 'political content' here and when? From the right, people do not seem shy about onward posting of content from Britain First and the like, but very few of those people directly commented on the election itself and then only in cursory way. The frequency of such comments did not seem to concentrate much towards polling day - the only right wing political comments were slight shout outs for UKIP and (after polling day!) for the Tories.
Pro-left comments tend to be from people who comment more frequently and more verbosely (OK, I plead guilty to verbosity!): something more akin to actual campaigning. They may not be actual voters (my feed contained pro Labour comments from Dublin and an SNP poster embedded in Manchester). I wonder if they might also be more inclined to share globally - a lot of pro-left content came to me from friends commenting on friend-of-friend threads. So 13% of Labour supporters commenting might feel like more of a left wing flood if each of those people is commenting several times, in more detail and to a broader audience.
In summary, I agree with broad left-right truth of this analysis but, as ever, there are lots of interesting subtleties that it would be great to tease out.
Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain. END-QUOTE
I used to take that article at face value but maybe it was slightly tongue-in-cheek.
@Bond_James_Bond I agree to some extent. Certainly the behaviour of especially the richer demographic of lefties is pure hypocrisy and smacks of wanting to pull up the drawbridge behind themselves and their own children.
Compare the 2002 Countryside March to the average protest today. Police that day said there was no trouble at all bar a few lost children and a couple of drunks needing a pointer to the nearest station at the end. No desecration of war memorials, no cars keyed, no paint poured on buildings and no windows smashed. A jolly good day out for nearly half a million people.
Many on the Left would have considered it perfectly acceptable to see those marchers incarcerated for their 'crime'.
Some, I'm sure, would have thought it only correct if a few thousand or more were machine gunned, to encourage the others to rethink their views on hunting.
Its these same lefties who have taken over the SNP.
Given Mr Simon's idea of humour was impersonating Mr Cameron and inviting YouTubers to sleep with his wife - I'm not sure he has any idea of what is humorous.
Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain. END-QUOTE
I used to take that article at face value but maybe it was slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Not even less unpopular than Ed Miliband, but less unpopular than Ed Miliband being beholden to the SNP. First Past the Post causes an incredible myopia sometimes. Speak to average people and they view the Conservatives as an out-of-touch party for the super rich, and Labour as an out-of-touch party of self-satisfied intellectuals. Neither of them are seen to represent the working man. That's why the SNP landslide suddenly came out from nowhere in Scotland, and that's why, despite Farage's best efforts, UKIP could still do the same thing in northern and eastern England. And the public is going to keep on being reminded of issues that they feel the big two are not addressing: bumper pay rises for the wealthiest, Islamic terrorism, rising immigration. It's a recipe for disaster.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
3 out of those 4 are left wing groups.
right wingers are all sweetness and light. as seen below the line on Guido Fawkes
Right wingers according to left wingers are nasty, spiteful, selfish. Left wingers according to right wingers are deluded, naive, (economically) illiterate.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
3 out of those 4 are left wing groups.
right wingers are all sweetness and light. as seen below the line on Guido Fawkes
Right wingers according to left wingers are nasty, spiteful, selfish. Left wingers according to right wingers are deluded, naive, (economically) illiterate.
@nigel4england don't remember our football bet, though I can believe my early season hubris may have led me to have a punt on Southampton when I was drunk! Send me details, please
The problem with Tw@tter isn't necessarily left vs right per say, although there is an element of that. The big issue is that nuanced argument is impossible in 140 characters and so engagement is impossible, while twitter is the hot thing to report on from serious media to celeb tittle tattle.
It is much easier to tweet simple slogans banksters, tax the f##kers, ban non-doms, ban zero hour contracts, than have a nuanced debate of the affects of changes to tax policy or who is affected by changes to non-dom status.
Arguably, sociopaths are worse than psychopaths. Sociopaths are parasites, who don't give a shit about anyone and take no responsibility for their actions - and form a large section of the prison population. Psychopaths tend to try to pretend to fit in more often.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I understand that, now that they are safely in power again, the Conservatives are cancelling the plans to upgrade the railways.
I am preparing a post on this, and the political implications, for my personal blog. I'd be happy to share on here if people want.
Essentially it is the fault of Network Rail, who have yet again failed to keep their costs and timescales under control. Although there is a little fault on the side of the government.
And they're not being cancelled (yet). the GWML upgrade is being continued, even though that is where the problems have occurred.
"it’s by far the more important social network for communicating with the electorate at large. Ofcom estimate that there are about 35m Facebook users in the UK and only 12m Twitter users."
And while "Dr" Eoin Clarke and his disciples were tweeting to the converted, Crosby was spending the Tories money on targeting undecided in margins via Facebook.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I understand that, now that they are safely in power again, the Conservatives are cancelling the plans to upgrade the railways.
I am preparing a post on this, and the political implications, for my personal blog. I'd be happy to share on here if people want.
Essentially it is the fault of Network Rail, who have yet again failed to keep their costs and timescales under control. Although there is a little fault on the side of the government.
And they're not being cancelled (yet). the GWML upgrade is being continued, even though that is where the problems have occurred.
Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain. END-QUOTE
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
You ruin your argument with the word 'warmongering'. The Iraq war can be and was justified. The poor man who Labour hung out to dry, Dr Kelly, believed in WMD. But Labour being Labour could not help but produce dodgy dossiers to head off its pacifist wing. Campbell is/was an odious bully.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
You ruin your argument with the word 'warmongering'. The Iraq war can be and was justified. The poor man who Labour hung out to dry, Dr Kelly, believed in WMD. But Labour being Labour could not help but produce dodgy dossiers to head off its pacifist wing. Campbell is/was an odious bully.
With the best will in the world, Iraq after Saddam has been a much worse place than Iraq under Saddam.
Finally able to comment again! Was getting some weird Guru Meditation error when logging on to Vanilla. Anyhoo, on now, and would like to thank Tissue Price for a great article.
From a personal POV I can attest to the lefty bias on both Twitter and FB. But I also think antifrank (?) had a point with the result being more to do with differential enthusiasm rather than a specific Shy Tory Syndrome.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
I was discussing what the priorities for this government should be over the next few years with a few people, Labour and Con. Housing came top unsurprisingly given that we're in London. Second was immigration reform and "sending those idiots on the boats back" was pretty much the settled view among both groups. Third, and this was the surprising one, was tackling obesity and public health in general. I think the news that kids are getting fat and the NHS is struggling under the strain of obesity related diseases and chronic illnesses has now reached an inflection point. I think there is a lot of mileage both politically and fiscally in getting fat people to slim down and basically forcing obese people into healthy diets in order to continue receiving free NHS treatment. We need to head off the explosion of obesity before we turn into the US with its stupid fat acceptance movement.
My own opinion is that obesity can be tackled with too much govt intervention. From my own experience with a family member, acid in foods is a cause of fat, the fat forms as a protection. Reduce acid content and it reduces fat. The change in diet from one healthy food to another was remarkable. Look on the supermarket shelves as I did when I realised this and see how much Gavascon type medicines are sold and you will begin to realise the scale of the problem. Not everyone is susceptible and different people have different reactions to different foods. Directing people to eat a certain way to qualify for the NHS seems totalitarian to me - a prejudice based on ignorance, especially it you just pass over an arbitrary borderline.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I understand that, now that they are safely in power again, the Conservatives are cancelling the plans to upgrade the railways.
I am preparing a post on this, and the political implications, for my personal blog. I'd be happy to share on here if people want.
Essentially it is the fault of Network Rail, who have yet again failed to keep their costs and timescales under control. Although there is a little fault on the side of the government.
And they're not being cancelled (yet). the GWML upgrade is being continued, even though that is where the problems have occurred.
This is a failure to learn the lessons of the WCML upgrade. It is almost impossible to carry out such a major upgrade on a running line, as the work has to be split into time-managed chunks that are too short because of the need to reopen the line after the night or the weekend closure window. There will also be emergency issues that crop up during the build that lead to unscheduled closures or late openings, therefore unhappy customers.
The optimum way of upgrading lines would be to close entire sections between stations for a month or two, with huge fleets of buses bypassing the affected stations. It will of course cause disruption on weekdays but at the cost of finishing the job more quickly.
If anything, this failure is a reason to press on with HS2 - it being much much easier to construct a new line than to upgrade one that is extant.
I hope the French are on the ball about the beheadings possibly being a diversionary tactic and the theft of gas cannisters of some description being the main purpose of this attack.
Very much depends on what that Air Products plant manufactures what the potential for some kind of subsequent bomb / gas attack could be and how much damage that could realistically do.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
- or indeed an instance of the BNP trying to silence judicially someone who objected to one of its positions or observations. This would, I think, be the nearest equivalent to Labour prosecuting Nick Griffin for accurately associating Muslims with racist paedophile rings. Of course this was a left-on-left spat, but if for the sake of argument we accept the proposition that the BNP is right-wing, are there any examples of its adopting the left's standards of intolerance for opinions dissenting from its own?
In 1982, the constitution was re-written, with more emphasis on support for the Conservative Party, but subsequent in-fighting over the club’s ‘hard right’ agenda led to many resignations. In 2001, the Conservatives formally severed relations with the club, which has ceased to exercise significant influence, with full membership below 600.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit. snip
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
I hope the French are on the ball about the beheadings possibly being a diversionary tactic and the theft of gas cannisters of some description being the main purpose of this attack.
Very much depends on what that Air Products plant manufactures what the potential for some kind of subsequent bomb / gas attack could be and how much damage that could realistically do.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
You ruin your argument with the word 'warmongering'. The Iraq war can be and was justified. The poor man who Labour hung out to dry, Dr Kelly, believed in WMD. But Labour being Labour could not help but produce dodgy dossiers to head off its pacifist wing. Campbell is/was an odious bully.
With the best will in the world, Iraq after Saddam has been a much worse place than Iraq under Saddam.
In previous posts I have pointed out that if Blair and Bush should be criticised it is for not planning for the post war period. That does not mean that the motives for the invasion were not justifiable. But at the time the UN was enforcing sanctions that were killing children (thanks to Saddam misusing the terms of the sanctions). Saddam left alone could and probably would quite easily have ethnically cleansed an a large scale those people not to his ethnic liking. Turning a blind eye and doing nothing does not make you a saint.
I was discussing what the priorities for this government should be over the next few years with a few people, Labour and Con. Housing came top unsurprisingly given that we're in London. Second was immigration reform and "sending those idiots on the boats back" was pretty much the settled view among both groups. Third, and this was the surprising one, was tackling obesity and public health in general. I think the news that kids are getting fat and the NHS is struggling under the strain of obesity related diseases and chronic illnesses has now reached an inflection point. I think there is a lot of mileage both politically and fiscally in getting fat people to slim down and basically forcing obese people into healthy diets in order to continue receiving free NHS treatment. We need to head off the explosion of obesity before we turn into the US with its stupid fat acceptance movement.
I think this is correct. If the US keeps going the way they are, they will end up with most of the population driving those little carts just to get about, and having to retire early due to diabetes. I have even heard obesity is becoming a national security issue in the US, as the military struggles to recruit enough fit people (or nearly fit people). Given that we will have to address the direction of travel at some point, we should do it as soon as possible, while people still remember what a healthy diet looks like.
In 1982, the constitution was re-written, with more emphasis on support for the Conservative Party, but subsequent in-fighting over the club’s ‘hard right’ agenda led to many resignations. In 2001, the Conservatives formally severed relations with the club, which has ceased to exercise significant influence, with full membership below 600.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit. snip
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
Thanks, I thought I hadn't heard of them in decades. This invocation of people who don't exist any more is also very characteristic of the left. The Monday Club is, apparently, a current example of right wing nastiness to the left comparable to the left's nastiness to the right, but when you delve into it, you find it fell apart 20 years ago and no nastiness was even cited. What really offended logical_song about the Monday Club was that it disagreed with the left and that it existed.
It is very reminiscent of the school textbook Winston Smith reads in 1984 in which capitalists were evil people who wore top hats, owned factories and were barons who bonked female serfs.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
FWIW I think the 2005 result was catastrophic for Labour's psyche. It was never popular after Iraq. It won because it was less unpopular than Howard's Tories. It governed as if nothing had changed since 97. Indeed some folk like Sion Simon went basically bat shit crazy thinking Labour was omnipotent.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
You ruin your argument with the word 'warmongering'. The Iraq war can be and was justified. The poor man who Labour hung out to dry, Dr Kelly, believed in WMD. But Labour being Labour could not help but produce dodgy dossiers to head off its pacifist wing. Campbell is/was an odious bully.
With the best will in the world, Iraq after Saddam has been a much worse place than Iraq under Saddam.
In previous posts I have pointed out that if Blair and Bush should be criticised it is for not planning for the post war period. That does not mean that the motives for the invasion were not justifiable. But at the time the UN was enforcing sanctions that were killing children (thanks to Saddam misusing the terms of the sanctions). Saddam left alone could and probably would quite easily have ethnically cleansed an a large scale those people not to his ethnic liking. Turning a blind eye and doing nothing does not make you a saint.
What example of post-war planning in the Muslim world do you think should have been followed? Somalia? Afghanistan? Libya? Even if we had reduced casualties by half, far fewer children would have died if we simply left Saddam to it.
I hope the French are on the ball about the beheadings possibly being a diversionary tactic and the theft of gas cannisters of some description being the main purpose of this attack.
Very much depends on what that Air Products plant manufactures what the potential for some kind of subsequent bomb / gas attack could be and how much damage that could realistically do.
Blimey, Air products is a supplier to the Co I work for.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
Yep - you don't get Tories keying leftoids' cars or vandalising war memorials or trying to prevent them adopting children or trying to cost them their career for holding the wrong view on climate science (or calling for them to be killed for doing so, as one leftist academic did). All these are only done by the left, and are the thin end of a wedge whose other end, historically, is gulags (another the left isn't sorry about) at the slightest opportunity.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I understand that, now that they are safely in power again, the Conservatives are cancelling the plans to upgrade the railways.
I am preparing a post on this, and the political implications, for my personal blog. I'd be happy to share on here if people want.
Essentially it is the fault of Network Rail, who have yet again failed to keep their costs and timescales under control. Although there is a little fault on the side of the government.
And they're not being cancelled (yet). the GWML upgrade is being continued, even though that is where the problems have occurred.
This is a failure to learn the lessons of the WCML upgrade. It is almost impossible to carry out such a major upgrade on a running line, as the work has to be split into time-managed chunks that are too short because of the need to reopen the line after the night or the weekend closure window. There will also be emergency issues that crop up during the build that lead to unscheduled closures or late openings, therefore unhappy customers.
The optimum way of upgrading lines would be to close entire sections between stations for a month or two, with huge fleets of buses bypassing the affected stations. It will of course cause disruption on weekdays but at the cost of finishing the job more quickly.
If anything, this failure is a reason to press on with HS2 - it being much much easier to construct a new line than to upgrade one that is extant.
Yep. I've been screaming about the WCML upgrade on here for years. If the last train runs at one in the morning, and the first at six, they get five hours on site. By the time the worksite has been made safe and the equipment moved on, they sometimes had less than two hours to do work before they had to move off to clear the site for the next train.
In the meantime, the staff are paid time-and-a-half or double-time for the full shift, and they cannot use their experience elsewhere on the network.
As you say, long-term blockades (for instant the recent 37-day one at Nottingham) is the way forward.
I am still bemused as to how something enacted in primary legislation can be unlawful, unless the drafting was shoddy. If it is passed by secondary legislation then politicians deserve all they get from trying to legislate on the cheap.
Although not completely to my personal taste, a Conservative-UKIP arrangement would have indeed been a more representative result.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Francis Pym got handbagged by Maggie in 83 for pointing out that massive majorities made for poor government. I think he was right then and it was true of Blair as well.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
You ruin your argument with the word 'warmongering'. The Iraq war can be and was justified. The poor man who Labour hung out to dry, Dr Kelly, believed in WMD. But Labour being Labour could not help but produce dodgy dossiers to head off its pacifist wing. Campbell is/was an odious bully.
With the best will in the world, Iraq after Saddam has been a much worse place than Iraq under Saddam.
In previous posts I have pointed out that if Blair and Bush should be criticised it is for not planning for the post war period. That does not mean that the motives for the invasion were not justifiable. But at the time the UN was enforcing sanctions that were killing children (thanks to Saddam misusing the terms of the sanctions). Saddam left alone could and probably would quite easily have ethnically cleansed an a large scale those people not to his ethnic liking. Turning a blind eye and doing nothing does not make you a saint.
I always find this claim a bit weird.
Are you seriously saying that if you had to choose between
1) knowingly, actively fabricating evidence of WMD and then lyingly presenting it to Parliament to justify a bloody invasion; and 2) neglecting to plan for what happened next
you think 2) was the greater evil? How on earth do you arrive at that? The former was deliberate mendacity, the second merely negligence and wholly contingent on the former. 1) guaranteed bloody mayhem and without 1) there'd have been no 2).
It's like saying invading Poland was OK, it was the Katyn Massacre and setting up of the General Government that were the really bad things.
In 1982, the constitution was re-written, with more emphasis on support for the Conservative Party, but subsequent in-fighting over the club’s ‘hard right’ agenda led to many resignations. In 2001, the Conservatives formally severed relations with the club, which has ceased to exercise significant influence, with full membership below 600.
Why? Because experience shows that admitting you are a Tory is just not worth the hassle. Put a sticker in your car - get it keyed. Put a poster in your window and all your neighbours know your politics, including those who have a problem with that - and might be inclined to remember it when out late after a night on the piss.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit. snip
Seriously, it's only lefties who are nasty to rightists? NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
Give me an example, say, of any of those groups calling for scientists who support the global warming hypothesis to be judicially killed; or of Monday Club (does that still exist?) members preventing Labour supporters from adopting children; or of UKIPpers vandalising, say, a mosque, or a Polski Sklep. Just one of each will do.
Thanks, I thought I hadn't heard of them in decades. This invocation of people who don't exist any more is also very characteristic of the left. The Monday Club is, apparently, a current example of right wing nastiness to the left comparable to the left's nastiness to the right, but when you delve into it, you find it fell apart 20 years ago and no nastiness was even cited. What really offended logical_song about the Monday Club was that it disagreed with the left and that it existed.
It is very reminiscent of the school textbook Winston Smith reads in 1984 in which capitalists were evil people who wore top hats, owned factories and were barons who bonked female serfs.
Total crap. Ok so I'm out of date with internal Tory party institutions. I object to you telling me what I object to and to telling me that I'm on the left.
According to R5L, the beheading in France might have been a self-decapitation by means of an explosive device.
Therefore (pure guesswork, and probably wrong) it might have been an attack on the factory that went wrong early?
Was it? I hadn't heard that. I guess we're still in the rumour phase.
Apparently heads can survive suicide bombing quite well; they get propelled into the air. Years ago there was a picture in the STimes magazine of the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bombing that I wish I'd never seen ...
Grisy, I know - but when I was with the plod at 7/7 - the whole decapitation=suicide bomber thing was the default assumption. I don't recall the mechanics of it, but someone did explain it to me... urgh.
The Times reporting the head on the fence thing. Apparently it was a fair way from the ram-raid.
According to R5L, the beheading in France might have been a self-decapitation by means of an explosive device.
Therefore (pure guesswork, and probably wrong) it might have been an attack on the factory that went wrong early?
Was it? I hadn't heard that. I guess we're still in the rumour phase.
Apparently heads can survive suicide bombing quite well; they get propelled into the air. Years ago there was a picture in the STimes magazine of the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bombing that I wish I'd never seen ...
Comments
Even when Tories win, Lefties can't accept that voters rejected them. It was all some terrible mistake - the voters were duped/stupid/one more push blah blah.
Jeez.
I'm constantly reminded of So, Mrs. Lincoln...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3096606/Arise-Sir-Stockfish-bizarre-Knights-tour-Italy-protecting-ancient-recipe-mummified-fish-delicacy.html
Very Pythonesque.
IMO Labour would have fared better if they had had far smaller majorities in 97 & 01 and a coalition in 05.
The Tories won in 2015, because they were less unpopular than Ed and Labour. They would be well advised to remember that.
All parties should not confuse an election win for popularity. That mistake has nearly killed Labour.
Edit: @antifrank is of course right that people will behave differently under different systems of voting.
Should have listened to those anti-Iraq war protestors. It is still a live issue, and I cannot comprehend why the party tolerates Alastair Campbell as a spokesman after his role in the warmongering.
I think that the Tories know that they are never going to be considered "cool", or liked. Their trump card is being able to persuade people that they are "Competent". As long as they hold on to that, then labour really do have a mountain to climb.
Leftism is basically a conflation of moral incompetence, economic envy, spite, and grasping corruption. Its adherents have mutually agreed to overlook one another's appalling personality failings and to excuse these in themselves by collectively agreeing to consider these pathologies some sort of valid political opinion. This confers a spurious respectability on utterly disgusting opinions and motivations.
What makes it even more toxic is that it is innately, inevitably authoritarian. An envious moral incompetent isn't going to live and let your grammar school or your "mansion" live, let's face it - he's going to want to destroy sooner that let you benefit.
This is perhaps why you tend to find that lefties will tolerate only one opinion - their own - on any subject. They can't really allow a debate to develop on any tenet of leftist envy because to do so exposes the envy for what it is. That this is impossible is why they are always splintered into various people's fronts of Judaea. A lefty's idea of solidarity and unity is everyone shutting up and agreeing with him, even if he keeps his changing his mind. Many lefties (eg climate scientists, the BBC) give the impression that they think it should be illegal to disagree with them.
Consequently, until May 7th, everyone was behind Ed Miliband, and since May 8th nobody ever agreed with him to begin with. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Instead of having supporters in an echo chamber that does nothing but reinforce current support, and perhaps even repel potential supporters, they should spend money targeting messages directly.
For instance, it is easy for FB to see than I'm into walking and railways. It would be easy for (say) the Conservatives to target me with messages about the money being spent on upgrading the railways, or on the new coastal path.
I think the Conservatives did some of this at the GE; I'm not sure Labour did. If they did it got swamped out by the other messages.
After all, that is they way Google, FB and Twitter all hope to make money. The only problem is that it costs, even if the poor man's approach, of getting supporters to spam messages, can be counter-productive.
Who is Sadie Frost anyway?
http://news.sky.com/story/1508786/man-beheaded-and-islamist-flag-raised-in-france
Although I personally find it a little freaky at times. How much does FB know about me? (or the ad server for PB.)
And it has taught Lab a very valuable lesson, as you say.
Compare the 2002 Countryside March to the average protest today. Police that day said there was no trouble at all bar a few lost children and a couple of drunks needing a pointer to the nearest station at the end. No desecration of war memorials, no cars keyed, no paint poured on buildings and no windows smashed. A jolly good day out for nearly half a million people.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/isis-brutally-execute-prisoners-drowning-5934470
Lovely way to celebrate ramadan.
Some, I'm sure, would have thought it only correct if a few thousand or more were machine gunned, to encourage the others to rethink their views on hunting.
Based on this reasoning, I was expecting the final result to be slightly more favourable to the Tories than the 2% lead which was my best estimate of what the polls were in aggregate showing: I posted here that I thought it would end up at around 36% Con, 32% Lab. In the event the Con figure was a smidgen higher and the Lab figure a smidgen lower than I'd expected. This, combined with the fact that the Conservatives did a superb targeting job, gave Cameron his narrow majority.
In other words, differential enthusiasm, not shy Tories.
With Indyref and GE2015 behind us, Its only the extremists on both sides of the Cyberwars who fight it out daily on Twitter/FB. The MSM chooses to only report about the nationalists and seems blinded to the fact that unionists are just as bad. I feeling is that there is a good argument for saying what is said on twitter should stay on twitter, unless it's criminal behaviour. As Sturgeon said she receives hundreds of abusive tweets but chooses to ignore them.
To get a feel for the Cyberwar being fought here's the best couple of sites to dip into:
Queen of Cyberunionism:
https://twitter.com/Historywoman
king of Cybernatism:
https://twitter.com/WingsScotland
There are many websites on both sides of the equation where these guys fight it out on a daily basis, each side gives as good as it gets. Check out Wings over Scotland, Smash the SNP, United Against Separation, SNPout, Tactical Voter etc.
I fear the EU REF CyberYes and CyberNo campaigns will make the above look like a minor skirmish. As the MSM will be split, as opposed to backing one side, I think this will turn very nasty.
NF, BNP, Monday Club Tories, UKIP are all sweetness and light?
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/04/twitter_earnings_and_acquisitions_the_company_s_in_trouble_and_its_options.html
''Whatever happens, the future of Twitter is being something other than what it is right now. The company isn’t dead but walking wounded, like the Earl of Gloucester, blind and lost, heading for the Dover cliffs.''
QUOTE
We cannot be killed
Perhaps the magnitude of the moment we face is too great for us collectively to bear. Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority, and in so doing utterly shatter the glass paradigm of cyclical politics which has contained us for the century since 1906. This ought to herald another decade of strong, confident, consensual Labour government. Which will finally and irrevocably transform the nature of politics and civic life in Britain.
END-QUOTE
right wingers are all sweetness and light. as seen below the line on Guido Fawkes
A few questions, what counts as 'political content' here and when? From the right, people do not seem shy about onward posting of content from Britain First and the like, but very few of those people directly commented on the election itself and then only in cursory way. The frequency of such comments did not seem to concentrate much towards polling day - the only right wing political comments were slight shout outs for UKIP and (after polling day!) for the Tories.
Pro-left comments tend to be from people who comment more frequently and more verbosely (OK, I plead guilty to verbosity!): something more akin to actual campaigning. They may not be actual voters (my feed contained pro Labour comments from Dublin and an SNP poster embedded in Manchester). I wonder if they might also be more inclined to share globally - a lot of pro-left content came to me from friends commenting on friend-of-friend threads. So 13% of Labour supporters commenting might feel like more of a left wing flood if each of those people is commenting several times, in more detail and to a broader audience.
In summary, I agree with broad left-right truth of this analysis but, as ever, there are lots of interesting subtleties that it would be great to tease out.
http://labourlist.org/2015/06/labour-must-double-the-number-of-bame-mps-says-yvette-cooper/
Apparently there is a BAME hustings in Harrow tonight at 6.30pm - looks like a ticket event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn4IpyVViw4
Left wingers according to right wingers are deluded, naive, (economically) illiterate.
A man has been beheaded and at least one other person injured in a suspected Islamist attack on a factory near the French city of Lyon.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33284937
So how long until we hear nothing to do with Islam, worry of reprisal attacks against Muslims...BBC limbo dancing around....
The problem with Tw@tter isn't necessarily left vs right per say, although there is an element of that. The big issue is that nuanced argument is impossible in 140 characters and so engagement is impossible, while twitter is the hot thing to report on from serious media to celeb tittle tattle.
It is much easier to tweet simple slogans banksters, tax the f##kers, ban non-doms, ban zero hour contracts, than have a nuanced debate of the affects of changes to tax policy or who is affected by changes to non-dom status.
Essentially it is the fault of Network Rail, who have yet again failed to keep their costs and timescales under control. Although there is a little fault on the side of the government.
And they're not being cancelled (yet). the GWML upgrade is being continued, even though that is where the problems have occurred.
And while "Dr" Eoin Clarke and his disciples were tweeting to the converted, Crosby was spending the Tories money on targeting undecided in margins via Facebook.
Spending for the sake of box-ticking is wrong on so many levels.
https://theodoredalrymple.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/the-modern-british-the-least-attractive-people-in-the-world/
Journalist Laurie Penny(PennyRed) banned from Facebook for using pseudonym.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/24/journalist-laurie-penny-banned-from-facebook-for-using-pseudonym
Maybe this is the time that the moderate imams decide stand up to the extremists, at least in France.
Hasn't she got a new book to sell?
Anyhoo, on now, and would like to thank Tissue Price for a great article.
From a personal POV I can attest to the lefty bias on both Twitter and FB. But I also think antifrank (?) had a point with the result being more to do with differential enthusiasm rather than a specific Shy Tory Syndrome.
The optimum way of upgrading lines would be to close entire sections between stations for a month or two, with huge fleets of buses bypassing the affected stations. It will of course cause disruption on weekdays but at the cost of finishing the job more quickly.
If anything, this failure is a reason to press on with HS2 - it being much much easier to construct a new line than to upgrade one that is extant.
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Persecuted-Russian-transsexual-and-gay-friend-flee-to-Syria-to-join-ISIS-407093
Welcome back, Mr. Barber.
I hope the French are on the ball about the beheadings possibly being a diversionary tactic and the theft of gas cannisters of some description being the main purpose of this attack.
Very much depends on what that Air Products plant manufactures what the potential for some kind of subsequent bomb / gas attack could be and how much damage that could realistically do.
http://www.airproducts.com/products/overview.aspx
But at the time the UN was enforcing sanctions that were killing children (thanks to Saddam misusing the terms of the sanctions). Saddam left alone could and probably would quite easily have ethnically cleansed an a large scale those people not to his ethnic liking. Turning a blind eye and doing nothing does not make you a saint.
Thanks, I thought I hadn't heard of them in decades. This invocation of people who don't exist any more is also very characteristic of the left. The Monday Club is, apparently, a current example of right wing nastiness to the left comparable to the left's nastiness to the right, but when you delve into it, you find it fell apart 20 years ago and no nastiness was even cited. What really offended logical_song about the Monday Club was that it disagreed with the left and that it existed.
It is very reminiscent of the school textbook Winston Smith reads in 1984 in which capitalists were evil people who wore top hats, owned factories and were barons who bonked female serfs.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-30843886
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3076983/British-neo-Nazi-allegedly-planned-copycat-Anders-Breivik-terror-attack-bullied-child-having-ginger-hair.html
It seems wilfully blind to contend that all the bad guys are on the left and all the good guys are on the right.
In the meantime, the staff are paid time-and-a-half or double-time for the full shift, and they cannot use their experience elsewhere on the network.
As you say, long-term blockades (for instant the recent 37-day one at Nottingham) is the way forward.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33285443
Therefore (pure guesswork, and probably wrong) it might have been an attack on the factory that went wrong early?
Well that's some going.
Personally, I thought the IRA bomber who blew himself was the best one for karma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DodCs1BLx4A
Are you seriously saying that if you had to choose between
1) knowingly, actively fabricating evidence of WMD and then lyingly presenting it to Parliament to justify a bloody invasion; and
2) neglecting to plan for what happened next
you think 2) was the greater evil? How on earth do you arrive at that? The former was deliberate mendacity, the second merely negligence and wholly contingent on the former. 1) guaranteed bloody mayhem and without 1) there'd have been no 2).
It's like saying invading Poland was OK, it was the Katyn Massacre and setting up of the General Government that were the really bad things.
It is very reminiscent of the school textbook Winston Smith reads in 1984 in which capitalists were evil people who wore top hats, owned factories and were barons who bonked female serfs.
Total crap. Ok so I'm out of date with internal Tory party institutions. I object to you telling me what I object to and to telling me that I'm on the left.
Apparently heads can survive suicide bombing quite well; they get propelled into the air. Years ago there was a picture in the STimes magazine of the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bombing that I wish I'd never seen ...
The Times reporting the head on the fence thing. Apparently it was a fair way from the ram-raid.