Nearholmer wrote: 30 Jul 2025, 4:52pm
Yep, for all the criticism of Starmer from a left-wing perspective, there wasnt, and isnt, a meaningful left-wing alternative, so all the moaning about the absence of a socialist miracle in twelve months does is open the door through which the devil steps in, wearing a tweed shooting jacket, and affably quaffing a pint of bitter, while making it clear to one and all that The Real Problem is brown people.
The 'Vote us or get them' guilt tripping tactic does require 'us' to not just be seen a lite version of 'them' with a greater veneer of respectability though.
Labour are going to be very disappointed if they think the same approach to 2029 will work as it did in 2024 and appear to overvalue the 'genius' of their electoral strategy and fail to understand that retaining power from incumbency is an entirely different game than winning it from opposition.
The contents of this post, unless otherwise stated, are opinions of the author and may actually be complete codswallop
Snoopy wrote: 3 Aug 2025, 9:22am
No problem with teenagers getting the vote,will they also be eligible for jury service and will the age of criminal responsibility been lowered?
Once upon a time, a long time ago, humans reaching puberty were regarded as essentially adults, if initially small adults. The modern notion of childhood was probably invented by The Victorians, who may have done so partly to retain property rights over their children for as long as possible.
One of the factors offered in defence of children remaining as such until 21, 18 or 16 is that their lack of life experiences disqualifies them from doing or deciding this and that. It's a valid argument, although sometimes rather self serving when children are kept as such by preventing them from having all sorts of experiences, responsibilities and other life chances that build experience," because they are children".
These days many children never grow up - we have large herds of kidults that seem to lack any life experience relevant to being a voter or other adult role. A candidate receives a vote because of their haircut or ability to say amusing and exciting albeit very irresponsible and/or nasty things of no utility. (Step forward Farrago or Boris Bokum the Klown).
Really, age has less to do with who is an adult and who isn't than we might think, eh?
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
Snoopy wrote: 3 Aug 2025, 9:22am
No problem with teenagers getting the vote,will they also be eligible for jury service and will the age of criminal responsibility been lowered?
The UK already has the lowest age of criminal responsibility in Europe, 10 years old. In a few other countries it's 12. Most it's 14-16.
The paranoia is strong among Reform supporters. A survey earlier this week found that supporting Reform policies is correlated with incorrectly believing that most immigrants arrived illegally, when it's thought to be 1-2% (and even Reform's chairman's wild overestimate is only around 10%).
But hey, if you think every row-boat is people-smugglers, is there any way to get you back to reality?
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Here's a rather good essay concerning that now commonplace feeling that politics and politicians are just no bluddy good. It points out that we humans are naturally unimpressed by power-seeking power-seekers who only seek the stuff because they want it, not necessarily to do anything useful to the rest of us with it.
The author provides a practical alternative from his many experiences of organising political movements that are rather more "real" - i.e. involving those concerned via invoking their enthusiasm for, and direct involvement with, something.
He hopes that the Corbyn's latest attempt to do politics will follow his advice. Who knows? We could risk a bit of hope ..... ...... ....... ?
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
Ex-Reform MP Lowe accused of 'scaremongering' after mistaking charity rowers for "illegal migrants"
I’m convinced that bloke is actually off his trolley, as in paranoid delusional.
Facebook randomly decided last year sometime to start feeding me his pronunciations, and I’d never heard of him, so didn't know who he was ……… from his postings I genuinely thought he was simply some random mad old racist with a Facebook account, so divorced from reality was it all.
Yesterday, he was posting some gigantic straw-man rant against benefit scroungers, all based on the idea that benefits allow people to live like kings.
Of course, he has a huge number of followers, all of them convinced that his ravings represent solid truth.
The anger in part of society against anything that a person or group does not like, is clearly palpable on social media.
The visceral comment by people beggars belief.
This is fed by poor journalism to a certain extent on tv and in the papers.
Trying to get a balanced point across is almost impossible.
Yep, there is a very, very deep “hurt anger” across the piece, almost as if a very significant minority of people are “hurt angry” about some almost undefinable thing, and then lash-out at anything and anybody who they take a mind to lash out against to relieve that feeling (their mind often led by newspapers, social media memes etc). The “social landscape” is more toxic, more polarised, more likely to zoom off into aggressive confrontation now than I can remember it being for my entire life.
My instinct is that what underlies it is a feeling of powerlessness and insecurity, so a need to assert to insane degrees in order to get back feelings of agency and self-respect.
Why? Well, it’s clearly partly down to social media and other media, because it’s now very well understood that nothing drives engagement in the way that anger/outrage does, so now everything has a “Daily Mail Algorithm” built into it, and it’s partly down to cheapjack politicians who know the same, and it’s partly down to deliberate breaking of social cohesion by agents of Russia and MAGA-thinking.
But, I wonder if it’s also exacerbated by three other factors:
- Covid, which reminded everyone that they are not immortal or all-powerful, and shocked some people by pointing out tgat sometimes the wants of the individual get sacrificed for the perceived needs of the herd (lockdowns), so was humbling;
- climate change, which everyone (even those who deny it) knows is real, threatening, and from an individual perspective unstoppable; and,
- an ageing population, with a noticeable proportion of pensioners who are grumpy and intolerant because their lives haven’t turned out how they hoped, and they have nothing to look forward to beyond degenerative illness and death.
Then, of course, there are people who live in places/circumstances which, frankly, would make anyone feel hurt and angry, so physically cr@ppy environments, places where petty anti-social behaviour is rife, absence of jobs, or jobs that are themselves soul-destroying, etc, and objectively the proportion of the population who are in that boat has increased, as it always does in times of economic hardship.
Of course, and thankfully, there are still oodles of people who aren’t going around “hurt angry”, and one can still gave a zillion good social interactions, but this happy breed we no longer are, if ever we were.
Snoopy wrote: 18 Aug 2025, 8:13am
The anger in part of society against anything that a person or group does not like, is clearly palpable on social media.
The visceral comment by people beggars belief.
This is fed by poor journalism to a certain extent on tv and in the papers.
Trying to get a balanced point across is almost impossible.
There are a couple of things here:
(1) Social media is not representative of public opinion.
(2) Social media algorithms drive outrage, because outrageous posts generate clicks, and number of clicks boosts them in the algorithm. It's quite literally a machine to amplify hatred and outrage.
Jdsk wrote: 18 Aug 2025, 10:32am
I was about to ask if others were including this forum in "social media". But the answer should now be obvious.
I used to lump all forums into "social media"; but with the recent dominant effect of algorithms, there's a case for using a different classification. I do believe that (generally) forums are a lot more social, and allow more in-depth analysis.
