Cliff edge ahead!

DexEUs Midnight Runners! No fair. They get possibly meaningful upheaval while we just get the guys fired on the toilet, or groveling resignation letters. Dude after vanishing dude. We’re running out of nicknames at this point.

Amazed to find on google that DMR is still going strong, and happy to know about the sudden windfall for them courtesy of these craven folks.

But up to now reality has proven that there actually won’t be any ”Brexit” -(if the definition of ”Brexit” is a ”real exit” from Europe) – the silly dudes can resign all they want and as we have spend a lot of time lately in ”Britain” –
(as it has become a lot more ”affordable” for anybody who earns her or his dough in Dollars or Euros) – and some of our best British friends even toured Germany with us last weeks –
(and – even kind of – liking it) –
and especially Dresden – which is another ”sign” – that no silly dudes will be able to turn back time in a Europe where just far too many of US -(”real” Europeans) have ”conquered” -(very, very peacefully) – every single country of this continent.

I am of oldster’s opinion too – it is baffling to see the marginal win that Brexit eked out with the assistance of the right-wing billionaires running the press, Putin, and Facebook, held to be binding. At this point it’s clear the Leave campaign broke multiple laws and was in close collusion with the Russians. Why not nullify the whole thing ?

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
– RL Stevenson.

The Brexit banquet is coming up.
As Trump’s trade wars heat up, and the Supreme Court becomes a tool of extremists stuffed with radical activist judges, a banquet is being prepared for the deplorable few that voted for him. Unfortunately we all dance attendance on that banquet..

Conservatives are traitors and wreckers.

The center of the Democratic Party (the Left knows better) are now in the position where they can and will claim that every election or vote they lose* is totally illegitimate,

They got more votes.

I don’t get it. Brexit is overwhelmingly driven by the OLD, with a perfectly ridiculous pining for the Empire. It is absolutely screwing prospects for those oldster’s children, and as others have pointed out it really has no democratic legitimacy at all.

So why are those children so supine? Where is the outrage? Why aren’t there millons of them marching? Why isn’t Parliament Square continually awash with tear gas? It is the only way the screwing can be averted.

JQ–

“The bigger point is that the ethno-nationalist right have no real solutions to the problems created by the breakdown of neoliberalism. Brexit, Trumpism and so on make for emotionally satisfying gesture politics, but they don’t actually work.”

As I have said previously about some other posts, I wish I’d said that. The fact that emotional gestures suffice to place people in office, however, indicates that the problem must be addressed by more than purely intellectual dissent, but by some sort of equal and opposite reaction. And that probably means lots and lots of money in the place of mouths.

McManus reiterates the opinion of someone on another thread, that propaganda, advertising or any form of political messaging doesn’t work, and people come to their opinions without any outside influence as if they were just born that way. At what point did the Putin-friendly left develop this insane idea? How do they plan to enact any political change, or fight any conservative movement, if they deny that voters can be influenced? Just stand back and let the 1%’s money wash over the electorate because it makes no difference to the outcome?

This is nihilism. Is this what the beardy old dudes of the left have been reduced to, nihilism and the abrogation of all political engagement? Or is this the consequence of believing that only an armed vanguard can save the working class, so there’s no point in trying to change minds?

At what point did the Putin-friendly left develop this insane idea?

I can’t deal. I cannot and will not converse with this level of malicious madness. You win.

Sorry Bertram if the thread is getting jacked.

Well, no actually. The cliff edge isn’t ahead. Its behind! And that comfortable feeling of weightlessness…, it doesn’t mean that the law of gravity has been suspended, its just another symptom that those jagged rocks at the canyon’s bottom are rushing at us faster by the moment.

I am across the pond. So the spectacle of watching your train wreck, isn’t quite as troubling. Perhaps it means that those responsible for our own even bigger trainwreck will get just an inkling of what it is they have unleashed. At least it will be gratifying for the Russians and Chinese to contemplate the new world order that they will soon be in charge of.

I wonder if, and hope that, Robert Mueller and his legions will issue a report (along with further indictments) that will make it impossible for any of the traitors on both sides of the pond to continue to escape their due comeuppance, and will free the rest of us to pursue more productive politics. Am I crazy? Our last best hope in prosecutors?

Related: does the timing of all this resigning in Britain have anything to do with Trump’s impending visit? I can easily imagine the Donald meeting with Boris just before he meets with the queen, or just after. Much as I love “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”‘s in-your-face lyrics to the monarchy, I feel awe before this queen’s fortitude, and her fortitude actually gives me hope.

The bigger point is that the ethno-nationalist right have no real solutions to the problems created by the breakdown of neoliberalism. Brexit, Trumpism and so on make for emotionally satisfying gesture politics, but they don’t actually work.

The non-functionality of Brexit and Trumpism are features to prevent the voting majority from pursuing policies that challenge the past thirty years of upward wealth concentration policies that have been obscured by the plausibly deniable ideological fig leaf of neoliberalism. From the perspective of the 1%, it is far better for the 99% to be engaging in organized racism than thinking about dangerous matters, such as realizing that the reason why the 99% has no money is that all the wealth it has created has been siphoned into the net worth of the 1%.

I still can’t see the UK going over the cliff, even more so now that the whole Brexit process is so obviously farcical. There’s no time for anything resembling a Brexit agreement (even with the transition period), so the obvious options are to revoke Article 50 or join the EEA. Obviously that requires agreement from the EU/EEA side but it would be a huge win for them, and the alternative is disaster all round.

If there were any adults in the room, Brexit never would have happened in the first place.

Everything that has happened surrounding Brexit to date could be predicted before the fact using the knowledge that the Tory party is the manifestation of institutionalized sadism. If there is a choice between two policy options, one which will hurt a large number of people and one which will benefit a large number of people, the Tories will always pick the former. Witness, for example, how Tory social spending cuts have been driven by hatred of the poor rather than by any economic need.

The EEA/Norway option is not viable to the Tories because it won’t hurt enough people.

Bob McManus has posted just about the only sensible comment so far.

The problem is that the UK had been going to the dogs for a long time before Brexit loomed on the agenda. Many ordinary, apolitical, sometimes bigoted, sometimes ignorant, people were aware of this, and given the chance to vent their frustration, chose to vote leave in the referendum. In this they were led by dishonest, often stupid, sometimes sadistic, sections of the political and media elite.

Yet the solution of most remainers seems to be to pretend that that nothing ever happened and to revert to ‘business as usual’, or to suggest that everything was rosy prior to 2016 and it has all been a big conspiracy. Indeed, rather than defend principles connected to European integration such as freedom of movement, they simply suggest that the country will become an apocalypse after Brexit. It is a re-hashed version of Thatcher’s ‘There Is No Alternative’. No attempt to understand how and why the UK has become such a dysfunctional place, or address the desperate need for political and social change.

Brexit is a symptom, not a cause of the UK’s problems.

In my local area we are facing an economic cliff-edge go a different kind. My local large town has gone from 4% non-native born population to 21% in a decade. This massive increase is mirrored both in the immediate vicinity but also in the wider south-east of England.

It isn’t for me to say, but I think by and large socially the increase is successful in that there is little (extra) violence and widespread integration. What is happening though is a massive infrastructure hit. Large towns are being planned and built all over, and all villages are having extra housing estates tagged on. It is not uncommon to have three sets of road-works in a 5 mile drive, and for that drive to take an hour.

What isn’t being built is a hospital. We already have the longest waiting times in the country, but there are no plans for expansion, just a wish.

I don’t see evidence that the kind of immigration is going to deliver the money to pay for all this. Anna Soubry (very pro-EU conservative for non-UK readers) said recently in parliament:

“in some parts of our country a large number of people have come in, but these are invariably Polish people, Latvians and Lithuanians who do the work that, in reality, our own constituents will not do. It is a myth that there is an army of people sitting at home desperately wanting to do jobs. The truth of the matter is that we have full employment, and we do control immigration. How do we control it? It is called the market. Overwhelmingly, people come here to work. When we do not have the jobs, they simply do not come.

… However, I say to the right hon. Lady that she must speak to the businesses in her constituency, and she must ask them, “Who are these people? Where have they come from? Why have you not employed locally?” I have done that with the businesses in my constituency, and some have told me that they have probably broken the law. They have gone out deliberately and absolutely clearly to recruit local people, and they have found that, with very few exceptions, they have been unable to fill the vacancies. They take grave exception to anybody who says that they undercut in their wages or do not offer people great opportunities. It is a myth, as I say, that there are armies of people wanting to work who cannot work because of immigration.”

Soubry says these immigrants are not cutting wages, but is it surely a new form of economics that increasing the supply of a resource does not reduce the price of that resource. The major issue in the UK economy identified over and over again is flatlining productivity, and here we have the explanation – massive increase in labour that removes the need to innovate and increase productivity.

I see no sign that this massive wave of immigration based on low-wage jobs can pay for the infrastructure needed to accommodate it. All I see is continued slide in living standards.

And that’s the problem. Cliff-edge of unknown height, or get locked into a downward slide that, if we buckle now, we can never get out of and leads to an underfunded impoverished gridlocked nation.

That really reads some kind of… serious?

I could be wrong, I didn’t think they would get the Thai kids out safely, but like Bertram I see the cliff(s!) ahead horrible terrible times approaching and I feel surrounded by stark raving madness and insatiable greed. Worse than 1960s, I could then at least understand the Cold War imperialists and neoconservative/neoliberal ambitions as much as I hated them. And hell to a degree the assholes won. The current mood feels like headlong fullbore autodestruction…like 1914.

Maybe this is how empires and civilizations end (themselves). I need the time to learn Mandarin.

It does appear that the British Tory Party is in complete disarray (as has been the case for some time, of course, but it pretended that it wasn’t). Unfortunately, it is divided between those who want Britain to be a satellite of Germany and those who want Britain to be a satellite of the United States (in practice, Brexit will lead it to become a satellite of both) while pretending that Britain can somehow remain an independent and powerful country after three decades of dismantling the economic structures which would have made that possible.

Also unfortunately, the Labour Party is similarly divided.

It seems there is no good prospect, which explains why everybody on this thread is yelling stupid abuse at each other (“Putin supporter!” “Demented maniac”) which serves no useful purpose except to make the person doing the yelling feel good.

In the short run Brexit will probably not be disastrous, because Britain stayed out of the Euro, but over the longer period it will probably prove extremely unpleasant. Unless the British public are prepared to make the sacrifices required to reconstitute Britain’s economic independence (which is spun by the pro-German-satellite crowd as “North Korean”). I doubt that they are, and see no prospect of any British government doing that in any case.

I’m struck by Dipper’s use of hypotheticals regarding the US and Canada when the parallels between Brexit and the actual situation there are so obvious and widely agreed. Like the Brexiteers, Trump has abrogated the existing agreements with Canada and wants to renegotiate on a “have cake and eat it” basis. Again like the Brexiteers, he whines like a baby when Canada responds by playing by the rules, matching his tariffs and so on.

The fact that Brexit is a match with the Trumpist attack on Canada (along with the rest of the democratic world) is agreed by friends and foes alike. Trump cheers Brexit and Boris Johnson wishes he had Trump instead of May. Invoking this case seems like a Freudian slip on Dipper’s part.

I’ll finally put on my Lenin/Spengler/Toynbee hat and outrage the crowd. Britain is just on one edge of the cliff going down. The “West” is done.

If Remain remains possible, I won’t argue with anyone trying to minimize pain. Do we think that a new referendum if possible would reverse, or that the EU will get all merciful? Ok then. If not, does anyone want May’s job? Does Corbyn?

If by some weird miracle Corbyn and Labour get in I just can’t see attaching to the cliffdivers in the G7. If there is a choice. I vote Lexit, go as socialist (expropriate EVERYTHING) as possible, break up with the NATO WTO alphabet soup, disarm*, and form new vassal alliances with who is likely to survive the next decades: BRICS and their dependents.

This would definitely help the radicals over here, but I won’t argue with any other kind of chosen calvary. Temporary amelioration of suffering is understandable.

*Corbyn favouring denuclearization? I wish we had better than Sanders.

@28
”And that’s the problem. Cliff-edge of unknown height, or get locked into a downward slide that, if we buckle now, we can never get out of and leads to an underfunded impoverished gridlocked nation”.

This I understand – as I heard it so often before – from Americans in the so called ”Rust Belt” – but that’s why I never understood the supposedly ”right”-(wing) solution to the danger of going over the Cliff – especially – as I mentioned before – if British Soccer at the same time comes up with all kind of -(European-multiculti-openminded) solutions which point to ”better” future?

And as I travelled all over Britain in the last months – and started to like ”keep calm and carry on” even more than ”protect me from what I want” and I met so many people from AAL over the world with such a pleasure -(especially the dude from Pakistan who seriously ran an ”Italian Restaurant” in London and was able to cook Spaghetti ”al dente”)
– and then in Bath spending all this time with some Japanese?

What more does a country need to understand that the solutions ARE NOT going over the cliff FFace von Clownstick-(or Brexit)like – cut the silly (Internet)drama – vacation time is upon us and if old Brits are able to live happily in Spain they also will be able to live happily in their so called own country – peacefully together with ALL these ”fureigners” who firstly brought Britain sooo much money that London now is one of the richest city on earth -(and thusly Great Britain one of the wealthiest countries on earth) – and THEN it’s just NOT a good idea to try to fight -(a very established reality) and cut yourself OFF.

Just deal with IT Dipper in a ”productive” and ”progressive” way! –
Make the best out of it just like your (MY) favorite Soccer Team!!

– and @
”the West is done”

Last week we were with British friends in Dresden and also booked a tour of Street Art in Dresden Neustadt and the so called ”Tour Guide” complaining right-away about ”Neoliberalism” told us we were staying in ”Disneyland” as we stayed close to the result Frauenkirche and in the Tourguides words ”an area where nothing was (”really”) older than 14 years” – and in the evening we went to a concert in ”der Frauenkirche” and heard a Brits saying that his dad -(”with very good reasons – some agreed) bombed the s… out of this place – and that’s why he -(the younger Brit) had given money to rebuilt it.

And that’s (one of the many) reasons – why ”the West” isn’t done AT ALL!

and about
ph:
”Real wages flat-line for decades and your elected leaders tell you things have never been better”.

Is still NOT a good enough excuse to vote for racists and morons!

I agree with this sentence, with one change:

The bigger point is that the ethno-nationalist right have no no one hasreal solutions to the problems created by the breakdown of neoliberalism.

I have not seen a plan from anyone–left, right, or off in a corner by themselves–that would get back to the central socio-economic fact of 1960: a median-educated worker could support a two-parent family on a typical income, in a neighborhood where two-parent families were the norm.

@ Layman- that is the analogy used by Guy Verhofstadt. But the UK never signed up to be a member of a federal state so it is not a correct one. The more correct analogy is a federal state growing by swallowing independent states, hence my Canada analogy.

Norway emerged from Sweden, The Republic of Ireland emerged from the United Kingdom, and more recently Czechoslovakia split. Can’t seem to see too many problems with those countries.

Given the mood of the voting publics in the Western world I don’t see any path by which Brexit – which at this point means hard Brexit – does not happen. That will be disastrous for the UK (or at least England). But I think commentators here and in the wider world are far too optimistic about the effects on the EU. The chaos that results from hard Brexit will not be limited to the UK and the EU project doesn’t look all that stable or resilient from outside Brussels. As just one example the euro losing the safety valve of the UK’s independent currency will have side effects that cannot be foreseen.

@44
”I have not seen a plan from anyone–left, right, or off in a corner by themselves–that would get back to the central socio-economic fact of 1960: a median-educated worker could support a two-parent family on a typical income, in a neighborhood where two-parent families were the norm”.

currently residing in an ”area” -(city) where a ”median-educated worker still supports a two-parent family on a typical income, in a neighborhood where two-parent families are still the norm” – I don’t understand it either – why so few people know about such ”plans”?

It’s like they never heard about ”well working social democratic societies”?
Or even worst – if the have heard about them – they try everything to stop ”plans”?

I agree with SamChevre, “The bigger point is that no one has real solutions to theproblems created by the breakdown of neoliberalism.”

Maybe some thought should also be given as to why it broke down. It certainly seems to be the case that a great many people were telling how it wasn’t working for them.

And so back, perhaps, to the EU which seems to have become predominantly a neoliberal enterprise. Someone above raised the question, just what sort of EU has it been that so many are now mourning? I’d go along with that too. John Gillingham’s book, “The EU: an Obituary,” seems to me to make that question a legitimate one to ask.

mcmanus: “Apparently they believe that 17 1/2 million voters were brainwashed or bribed or puppetized”

says the guy who consistently dismisses the democratic voice of the 66 million voters who supported Hillary Clinton.

We really, truly are dealing with literal mass psychosis. There’s nothing we can say or argue. They can only be professionally helped.

All I know is that it reminds me of when my wife’s relatives started spouting Tea Party/birther nonsense. What worries me most is that you’ll see Centrists embrace the security state bringing in god knows what kind of repressive horror. McCarthyism may be the last card to be played by the Dem establishment to prevent an insurgency taking the party over.

Indeed, rather than defend principles connected to European integration such as freedom of movement, they simply suggest that the country will become an apocalypse after Brexit.

The problem with this argument is that it does not address the reality of the question as to whether, after Brexit, the country will remain part of the first world. Will there be one or three generations that live a life with ten or thirty percent less joy, 5 or 50% more pain?

There is a certain fictionalisation of politics that is close to the root of the problem. People in general can be interested, in some particular country in one particular historical moment, in seeing a film with a certain theme. And no matter what that theme, a good film-maker can create a film that expresses that theme, and it will make money. But if even the greatest director tries to buck that trend, and create a hopeful movie when people want gloom, or a dystopia when people want optimism, they will end up with a box office bomb.

Even the most effective politicians don’t have a fraction of the control a film-maker does over what appears on screen. And the current idiots in government shouldn’t be trusted with a wedding video…

…and all the resulting countries are EU members.

Ireland.

Easter uprising, irish civil war, apartheid in ulster, death squads in ulster, terror bombings in canary wharf and eventual peace secured explicitly through the EU and structures that Dipper wants to destroy… and that’s something he thinks fit to envoke as a possible model?

Can we not have him posting here any more, please? Something about dismissing the deaths of those killed in the irish civil war or IRA campaigns makes me not want to share spaces with him.

Nick Barnes: A substantial proportion of rich and powerful people stand to make a massive killing from Brexit, either hard or soft. It was their idea in the first place, they hijacked the bus of state, and they continue to drive it towards the cliff edge. And they’re running non-stop “cliffs are great” commercials on the on-board TV, supplemented by announcements on the intercom all about how lovely the cliff will be when we get there.

I don’t think this is true. Do some? Sure. Some because they’re rather stupid, others because they’re financial spivs who made their money in financial speculation, or tax dodging (there’s some fantasy that the UK will be a larger version of the Cayman Islands). But most business people who actually do stuff at a large scale (banking, insurance, law, manufacturing) seem to be terrified. They know what’s going to happen because they’re planning for it. London’s importance as a financial and legal center may well disappear (Lloyds for example will lose a lot of it’s business which will have to migrate to the EU). A huge part of the services sector is dependant upon Europe – a EUrope where they will no longer have licenses, or even Visas. And obviously manufacturing is screwed in the short term.

One of the weird things about Brexit is that their traditional funders do not want Brexit, and the Tories have mostly responded by shutting the door on them. Politically the UK is at a strange point – the business class don’t have a political home.

@49
”Trump’s vulgarity, more than his wealth and his love for beauty queens, is where the unwashed bond with the president”

That’s not true as I as an ”unwashed” never ever bonded with the German Barons von Clownstick.

I mean the dude can’t even deconstruct a Harley Motor.
And that’s where your confusion might come from – you seem to think he can – because he likes… ”Beauty Queens”?

And I don’t frankly expect you to understand that many among the lower orders do not like, respect, or trust ”real a…holes”. For some strange reason we believe FF von Clownstick and the other elites – you voted for – do not have our best interests at heart. We’re wrong about that, too, I suppose. Bad US.

“If by some weird miracle Corbyn and Labour get in I just can’t see attaching to the cliffdivers in the G7. If there is a choice. I vote Lexit, go as socialist (expropriate EVERYTHING) as possible, break up with the NATO WTO alphabet soup, disarm*, and form new vassal alliances with who is likely to survive the next decades: BRICS and their dependents..”

Bob, there’s SO much that you say that I disagree with, and at the end of the day it’s just not worth arguing – too many un-shared assumptions. but THIS is just delusional. Even if “by some weird miracle” Corbin and Labor get into to power, do you really think that this agenda has even a ghost of a chance of coming to pass? And do you really think that the BRICS nations would allow your socialist utopia? If the BRICS win, it’s centuries of extreme right wing kleptocracies in our future.

Of course I strongly suspect that at some level you PREFER that to the messy Western European social democracies. You’re really not that far from PH/Kidneystones in that regard.

Corbin and Labor get into to power, do you really think that this agenda has even a ghost of a chance of coming to pass?

What else is there to hope for in Britain?

May mis-managing Brexit?

Corby and Labour in power with what, North helping? Will Brussels help Corbyn if he is a moderate Brexit or punitive Remain? Or remaining and submitting to Schauble/Merkel/Macron Austerity? I said “after Macron, Le Pen” and I believe it.

And then we have Trump, planning on punitive sanctions on Iran Nov 4. Hmmm… Don’t even think normality or amelioration is on the agenda. A hegemony is going down with a bang not a whimper. I don’t think 2020 is really going to help much more than kicking the can, if we even get there intact.

I’m Marxian, which means half apocalyptic pessimist and half Utopian radical. They have healed also the hurt of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

I’m old enough to have met lefties who were still claiming that “rumors” about the gulags were just propaganda. The notion that Russian involvement in Brexit and Trump’s election remains to be proven is a similar foolishness. If you want to point out that the hacking and bot machines shouldn’t have made a difference, very few will disagree. They did make a difference, however, because of the extreme vulnerability of both the UK and the US to manipulation by dubious actors, Putin et.al. but even more importantly eccentric billionaires and pure soul ideologues. Nietzsche wrote someplace that you could gauge the health of an animal by how many parasites it could tolerate without harm. Well, at this point the fleas matter very much because the animal isn’t very damn healthy.

Here’s an update from a Conservative point of view compiled from my various contacts.

It is confused. There are successive resignations but it is not clear what the end game is. My guess is that the Chequers Proposal, whilst not ideal, is something that most Tories can live with as forming the basis for future relationships with the EU. It is about as far as possible to go towards the EU without losing the self-determination given by Brexit. Michael Gove gave a strong defence of it on The Marr show (about 36 minutes in). The problem is if in the course of negotiations the EU forces some significant and irrevocable caving in – Single Market, FOM, even Common Fisheries Policy. At that point it becomes unworkable. So the resignations are there to build a strong body of MPs on the back benches to make sure that if we move from here, the deal is rejected and we leave with No Deal.

A key issue now is how the polls unfold. The Toriy polling have remained remarkably strong and stable possibly because both Remainers and Leavers supported May and because Corbyn is unelectable. This coalition may break down with consequences for how the parliamentary party behaves. I’ve had one Tory saying if the Chequers deal goes through they will vote for Corbyn as at least he believes in Brexit.

For many Brexiters, the Cliff Edge is not an economic one of No Deal, it is a political one of capitulation to the EU. The full argument is for another post, but in short if we give in, it is the end of the UK as an independent nation, and that means for many people particularly the poorer and less advantaged in society, it means the end of any hope they have of getting out of the circumstances they find themselves in as their representatives will have no power or influence.

Trying to imagine a world where Michael Gove could give a strong defence of anything…

Nope, some things just can’t be imagined.

@75
”Maybe I’m missing your point, I mostly feel that I am”.

My point just tries to stick it to ”the man” and really never to the workers – and if this point gets missed I’m truly sorry.

– and ”the man” and going over the Cliff -(or not?) in this case is somebody who might think:

”the Cliff Edge is not an economic one of No Deal, it is a political one of capitulation to the EU” and ”in short if we give in, it is the end of the UK as an independent nation” –

as this very ”manly” thinking really doesn’t care about –

”people particularly the poorer and less advantaged in society” –

it actually just pretends – like some British Count von Clownstick mumbling: Britain First!
-(but ”The Servants” – last)

Cian: There’s been some as-good-as-it-gets circumstantial evidence that the DNC hack was by a group working for the Russian government, but beyond that the case seems to get tortured fast. I suspect the Russians are being seen in everybody’s cold cereal breakfast because people can’t bear to think that their systems operating within their accepted rules produced this polymorphous disaster.

I could swear that 20 years ago people on Slashdot were up in arms about the US’s crappy voting machines, and that there was such a thing as a Euroskeptic.

Re: “facts”. For a certain kind of liberal, that’s all there is. Facts, that can be “checked”. This fact-obsession frees them to assert obviously fallacious implications, like “propaganda works, therefore Russian propaganda decided the US elections/Brexit referendum” or “Putin would like to divide the West, therefore the degeneration of politics in the Western world is Putin’s work”. Like all conspiracy theory, theirs relies on the implicit axiom that a true premise makes an implication true.

Cian: “The conspiracy theories about the US election are bad enough, but now it’s used to try and explain Brexit? ”

The last thing that I read had a major backer of Brexit go from 0 contacts with Russians, to 2, to 4, to 12, to 20; no money from the Russians to being offered a lucrative contract to his partner getting deals.

This has happened again and again and again in the US, as well.

It’s amazing how all of these sophisticated, innocent people lie so much, when there’s no conspiracy.

Excellent concise summary.

77 is a great contribution.

Yes TM is spot on about the desire to roll back all the gains of the last 50 years. That’s the project and we should be fighting it!

@88+90
”Yes TM is spot on about the desire to roll back all the gains of the last 50 years”.
”77 is a great contribution”.

which might need the following amendment from another thread:

”Ever-increasing rates of technological change will result in people constantly moving around the country to new jobs, work will shift from manufacturing to knowledge work, industries will die off and constantly be replaced by new ones, the U.S. will offload its manufacturing to 3rd world countries and move to high-profit knowledge work that will vastly increase the income of the average U.S. worker, and so on. All completely wrong”.

Mobility of workers in the USA has dropped to record lows because the interior of the USA is now depopulating and mired in poverty and chronic drug addiction due to the destruction of the middle class by shipping all the high-paid blue collar jobs overseas. Meanwhile, the areas with high-paying jobs are on both coasts, where housing and everything else has become so expensive average people can’t afford to live there”.

Yes?

”Converting the USA to knowledge work seemed like a good economic model”.

Not – for anybody who knows how few jobs ”knowledge work” creates.

”So ‘globalization sounded completely reasonable and sensible when it was proposed in the 1970s”.

It’s still ”completely reasonable” for any ”Producing Country” – where well paying manufacturing jobs were kept.

”Only in retrospect does it become clear what a gigantic trainwreck it turned out to be, and why”.

Only in ”Consuming Countries” -(like the US) – where the inequality of high paying ”knowledge work” and ”Finance” and poor paying ”service jobs” let to the trainwreck and the funny idea that it is the fault of ”trade” – while trade created million an millions of better and better paying jobs in ”Producing Countries” – which could lead us to –
”Brexit” –
and before to Great Britain selling nearly their whole car industry to Germany.
And nobody who is right in her or his mind wants to return to ”the regressive, illiberal, patriarchal, post-war post-fascistic world of 1960 when men worked in factories and women stayed home” but – when countries stop producing what they consume – they become a major problem with their workers.

And such ”problems” even might lead to Von Clownsticks and Brexits?

@ Keith “Substantial law breaking around the UK referendum”

I seem to remember Democrats congratulating themselves on their sophisticated use of Facebook data when Obama was elected. Suddenly when same data is used in a referendum with a result you don’t like, it is law breaking.

The referendum was a referendum on the EU, not a referendum about Aaron Banks.

The Government remain side massively outspent the Leave side. The most significant intervention by a foreign power was Obama telling us we would be “back of the queue”. There is as much evidence of collusion between Remain organisations as there are between Leave organisations. Attempts by Remainers to overturn the vote just because they lost are not well received amongst Leavers.

Remainers may think Leavers are all stupid little people incapable of thinking for themselves, but funnily enough Leavers don’t agree.

Just to make one point, the Remain side keep going on about how they are all young and Leavers are all old. So, do you think gullibility increases as people get older? That young people are fully aware of how politicians may lie to them but old people just believe anything they hear they like?

@Omega Centauri, 91:

There is some evidence that more flat growth distributions are unsustainable. Economic shocks cause support for right-wing parties to rise. In general, right-wing parties pursue policies which lead to accelerated wealth concentration, which in turn causes economic hardship for those below the 1% line, which in turn ought to result in increased support for right-wing parties. The feedback loop has no obvious endpoint and means that every recession will trigger a permanent rightward shift in the Overton window.

Decades of recessions since WWII–coupled with the beginnings of dementia among the baby boom generation–make demagogues like Trump seem reasonable to dangerously large portions of the electorate.

Dipper, my calculations are all from ONS data, calculated using data I downloaded from the ONS Migration Indicators Tool. I’m sorry that you don’t know the situation in your own town and don’t understand how to use or access data, but it’s not my problem – you are the one who has been misled about every aspect of the situation around you. I’m simply correcting you using publicly available data.

Of course there are non-UK born patients in the hospital in your area – 15% of the population is non-UK born. But what you see in the hospital waiting area is not a determinant of what the major pressures on a hospital are. Elderly people are the major cause of pressure on the UK system and the majority of elderly people in the UK are UK born, or at least have been living in the UK far longer than it has been in the EU.

As for fertility … yes the EU has a TFR of 1.8, which puts it below Sweden, France and Denmark, but above a lot of other EU countries. But 25% of births in the UK were to non-UK born people, and since only 9% of the population of the UK is non-UK born, you can see that these are the people who are propping up your TFR. This means that the TFR of UK-born people is below 1.8, i.e. below replacement. But this is irrelevant – as an explanation for what is happening in your area we need to look at population movements in your area. The Migration Indicators Tool contains this information, and shock! Every year since 2005 Harlow has seen a net reduction in its population from internal migration of about 400-500 people. You and I both know this is young people moving out of the area. In fact the ONS also has information on old age dependency ratios for Harlow, which has been static at 23-24% over the past decade. I think you can join the dots – your population is only retaining a static OADR because of young EU migrants moving in to replace the young UK residents moving out.

In fact the increase in population your area has seen is just 10% over a decade, or about 1% per year. Any reasonable society should be able to handle that, it’s what one might expect from a country with an excess birth rate. The UK government has been able to plan for this change but hasn’t. And in the past decade, who has been in government and who is responsible?

Facts, Dipper. They don’t support anything you believe. It’s time for you to change your beliefs.

faustusnotes

You have this the wrong way round. Young people are moving out of Harlow to neighbouring towns because they cannot afford the accommodation costs which are raised through multiple occupancy and lets to the immigrants coming into the area. And those immigrants moving into the area – what happens when they get old? A massive increase in healthcare demand. And how are we to meet that? More immigrants. As has been pointed out numerous times, mass immigration to meet the labour needs of your country is a pyramid scheme that just requires more and more immigration.

As has also been pointed out numerous times, the economic problems of the UK are primarily down to low productivity. Importing more and more people to do manual tasks is not the way to increase the GDP per person. As an example, people used to routinely use automated car washes to wash their cars, and now they use teams of Rumanians. Replacing machines with humans is to put into reverse the process that has delivered increasing living standards for decades. I find it unlikely that Rumanians doing car washing are generating sufficient income in income taxes to pay for their children’s education and their parents’ healthcare.

On the subject of population, immigration is causing a massive increase in the population, not keeping it stable. The scale of projected house building has to be seen to be believed – it is immense. To repeat, the increase in UK population projected by the European Commission from 2013 to 2056/60 is more than the population of Belgium, of Sweden, of Portugal, or of Austria. The infrastructure required is equivalent to the infrastructure of any of these countries. All to be paid for by the proceeds of manual car washing and minimum wage manual tasks. It simply doesn’t add up.

TM @ 77

“This is exacxtly what we need: a return to the regressive, illiberal, patriarchal, post-war post-fascistic world of 1960 when men worked in factories and women stayed home; life expectancy was so low and the demographics so young that society hardly spent anything on pensioners; unemployment was low because people were at work rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by the war and consumption had been so low for years that huge growth rates (by today’s standards) were easy to achieve; health care was cheap because medicine wasn’t very advanced; the education system was cheap because most children received only basic education while higher education was far more than today a privilege of the rich.”

You’ve never had it so good. Even the things you think are bad are actually great improvements. I seem to recall these kind of arguments being used by the Tories in the 80s and 90s.

Of course, what they amount to is ‘sit down and swallow it, we know what’s best for you’.

If there’s any possible way Versailles Democrats can avoid taking responsibility for not engaging with voters in blue states Trump flipped Versailles Democrats will cling to it for dear life – actually visit Wisconsin and shake hands with the great unwashed? Anything but that.

That’s the killer feature/bug of the Russia app. As long as Russia is responsible for the loss, then Dems don’t have to take responsibility for their choices over the last 3 decades. White voters account for 70 percent of the electorate and that number isn’t changing fast enough to avoid a couple of decades more losses.

Democrats either treat white rural voters as equals, or continue to lose ground in battle-ground states. But if Russia is really, really, really responsible for the Democrats loss, then maybe the Versailles Democrats can retain their perches and perks a while longer.

David Axelrod explains why Hillary lost:

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/03/david-axelrod-reacts-hillary-clinton-james-comey-237924

Dipper @100 like a cirrhotic alcoholic blaming his liver and not the booze.

Hi Chris, one final one, please, for the historically illiterate re: anti-London sentiments. This from the Economist is a pretty good place to start: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2016/12/24/how-norman-rule-reshaped-england

I recall crossing the US/Canada border for a visit as a young man. The US Customs agent asked how he could be sure I wouldn’t remain in the US. To say I was offended doesn’t come close to describing my feelings. I explained that I’d visited many times prior and always voluntarily returned north. The notion that Canadians ‘must’ wish to remain in America has always struck as very silly. My American relatives left the US many years ago for more socialist Canada. So there’s that.

Only someone spectacularly uninformed would assume that people in the UK, especially Brexit supporters harbor a deep desire to move to London. Even academics I know in Cambridge, loathe the city. The further north I travel the deeper and more open the hostility to ‘tossers’ in the south (no disrespect intended for London residents.)

The corrupting influence of London on even the English language can be traced to Caxton, from Kent, but who figured printing his English translations of European texts in the London/Norman dialect would be more lucrative. I expect even the most uninformed must have some notion of the violent attacks on various communities the English based at London. Numerous acts of uniformity issued by various monarchs provoked rebellions of different types. Loyalty to London meant the Welsh ‘could keep’ their language and culture, as a subordinate culture to the truly great and good culture of the English. Similar antipathies exist against Paris among the nominally ‘French.’

So, no. I doubt very much that all those brexiters in various parts of non-London UK who pulled the lever to leave did so because they believe brexit will permit theme to live in closer proximity to those they openly loathe.

But it’s telling you believe that Brexiter must harbor a secret desire to live in London. The very suggestion is, well, infantile. Walk into a restaurant in Brittany and announce you love Parisian food.

Three guesses what happens next.

John Quiggin @85:
From your perspective these things may be true, but the Tories don’t share that perspective. Everything we’ve seen suggests that they think claims of disaster are over-hyped, or at least they are managing to convince themselves of this.

But even if they did share that perspective they have a choice between a known and certain humiliation and political disaster (revocation of Article 50), vs this rather more vague and undefined thing.

If the Tories revoked Article 50 the following would happen:
+ Support for them would crater (it would either go back to UKIP, or just stop voting)
+ For the next 20-30 years their political identity would be defined by them having the referrendum, screwing up the negotiations and then backing down. They would be the butt of a million jokes. Everytime they said they would do things people would laugh (oh yeah, like the referrendum). And what’s more – their hardcore supporters (declining fast) would become at best lesser evil voters.
+ In the short term Labour would do really really well (which means loads of Tory MPs losing their seats at the next election, including some pretty powerful) as they would look incredibly statesmanlike in comparison.

Now yes, I agree all these things will probably happen with a hard Brexit. It may be worse for them. But that’s an outcome they don’t really believe in, whereas they can see the outcome I just described in their nightmares. And the nightmares are occurring with increasing frequency.

TM @ 77:

Wow. So you see there being a direct link between the income of a median educated worker and a patriarchical, illiberal, regressive world. The more median educated workers are paid, the more socially repressive the country will become. This is possibly the most insane argument I’ve ever seen on this board, and there have been a lot.

So you think that a world in which a median single mother can make enough to support her kids and have a decent lifestyle is necessarily a repressive, patriarchal one.

Tell me why you think more equal income distribution in a society is correlated with lower pensions, lower life expectancy, more patriarchy, worse education, worse healthcare? What is the mechanism?

The reality is that income distribution in a country is about political decisions. The US has high levels of inequality because the unions were destroyed, welfare was gutted, taxation on the rich was lowered, it stopped enforcing anti-trust regulations and the gutting of financial regulation. How would reversing any of these things affect the patriarchy, or lower old age pensions.

The reality is that a significant number of feminist women would like to be able to stay at home and raise their children. Not all of them, but plenty. A truly ‘feminist’ society would support that choice, just as it would support the choice of other mothers to work. Forcing women to work when they have children is just a different form of oppression to forcing them to stay at home and look after their kids, or stay in abusive relationships (which actually you seem to be okay with, as long as the mechanism is economic). Freedom is about having choices.

Some people on the left rhapsodize over the the post war period as the golden age of the welfare state, never mind that it’s much easier to run a welfare state when expectations and living standards are low,

So Sweden, Norway, Finland, France – or god, even Germany – these countries don’t exist? What you meant to say is that it’s much easier to run a welfare state when the rich aren’t sucking up all the resources.

And why any progressive would want to do this is beyond me. We live in vastly better times, with higher living standards, more freedom, more opportunity, more diversity, more access to knowledge and education and culture, better food, higher life expectancy, more leisure time, better environmental protection, and on and on.

Dude, check your privilege. These things are true if you’re in maybe the top 25% in the US and UK. The further down the socioeconomic ladder you go the less they’re true. Get to the bottom 25% and things have very definitely got worse. Way more people in the US now are hungry than were in the 70s. Housing has become harder to access (and homelessness has rocketed). Even basic healthcare is becoming out of reach for many (which the actual healthcare is expensive, due to monopolies, and not very good). Workplaces have become far more oppressive than they were then. For the poor schools are significantly worse than they were in the 70s. Lifelong debt is becoming a thing for an increasing proportion of the population. Salaries have stagnated since the 70s, despite the US GDP having grown significantly since then.

Logic alert: even if one believes that the current generation is comparably better off by most indicators than the preceding generations (which I think is true at least in most of Europe), one still needn’t embrace the status quo. I’m calling BS on the ridiculous delusion of a lost golden age.

The bottom 20-40% in much of Europe are worse off than their parents were. This is certainly true in the UK. And I suspect it’s a larger chunk too, once you start considering things like debt, accessing to housing, ability to start a family.

The reason that Social Democrats and centrists are dying is because they’re in denial about this very basic reality. It worked for a while when it was just the poor, who mostly (but no always, hence Brexit) stopped voting. But when this reality got so bad that it started to affect the lower end of the upper middle classes… At this point you might as well campaign on the corn laws.

@
”I’m calling BS on the ridiculous delusion of a lost golden age”.

Well – just imagine a house in Newport Beach CA? –

right on the Beach for just about 140 220$ -(and not the 2.6 Mill it cost right now) – a nice creme colored 280 SL convertible (1996) even a member of the Californian middle class could afford – and an always filled HUUGE Fridge with eggos and the nicest thing of IT all -(to get away from all teh icky materialism) – all the ”flower power” – and frozen Bananas nearly for free? –

And THE music!!
-(and the wonderful unspoiled yet – American landscape)

You can’t call BS if YOU have lived in… Meck-Pomm -(or Liverpool) at that time?

Oh, if you want detailed current discussion on Brexit, I recommend Richard North at EuReferendum, a source I got from Naked Capitalism. Last article I read was about Boris Johnson being all wrong on biking regulation. That kind of thing. He also co-wrote a book, something like Can the European Union Be Saved?

Layman: <On the other hand, nearly every claim about Russian interference in the US election, or Trump’s relations with Russia, or Russian funding of the Brexit campaign, seem to turn out to be true. I say ‘nearly every’ because there’s no evidence of actual voting machine hacking. Everything else though seems to be true, at least in some form. Even the pee tape.

And the evidence for the pee tape being true is? Have you actually done the due dilligence and checked that the breathless reporting in the WP/NYT etc is supported by the facts? Or are you just assuming that they’re right?

Afeman: There’s been some as-good-as-it-gets circumstantial evidence that the DNC hack was by a group working for the Russian government, but beyond that the case seems to get tortured fast. I suspect the Russians are being seen in everybody’s cold cereal breakfast because people can’t bear to think that their systems operating within their accepted rules produced this polymorphous disaster.

TBH we don’t even know if the computer was hacked, as there hasn’t been an independent forensic analysis of the allegedly hacked computers (which is really bizarre). I wouldn’t be surprised if the computers were hacked (I’m sure as we speak the NSA are hacking the computers of political parties in various NATO countries), but the evidence doesn’t actually exist for even this. We have no idea if the actual files came from hacking, or an insider leaking them. It’s all conjecture. The idea that the leak had any effect on voting seems very unlikely though. Can’t imagine too many working class voters in the rust belt thought “you know I was going to vote Hillary, but these articles in the NYT about boring admin stuff sure have changed my mind”.

I also remember the slashdot posts. We’re still using the same hacking machines for the most part. Though I think they mostly run on Windows XP now.

@Ph

about your funniest comment of the day:
”Walk into a restaurant in Brittany and announce you love Parisian food.
Three guesses what happens next”.

You get hugged by the owner of the restaurant who is from Spain but learned to cook in St. Germain?

BE-cause as even your hero Von Clownstick likes to say:

”France is not France anymore” –

Meaning – ”France” is a lot more nowadays than the narrow-minds of nationalistic morons can imagine?

And do you know that especially in Brittany the French restaurant owner are wonderful ”open-minded” Europeans?
They even wait to cook dinner for their diners from Great Britain until midnight if the ferries happen to be late.

AND I sooo love this question when life was ”poorer” -(for the poor OR the rich?) in the 60s or nowadays – and the creme-colored 280 SL -(from my grandfather was from 69 and not as censored – from 96) – and as I have these British friends who have all these funny photos from the 60s in London we even could make it all about ”Pre-Brexit” – the wonderful times when the Beatles really – really wanted to play on the European Continent – and all these Brits got their first sunburn in Lloret de Mar.

What a truly ”golden era”?
-(and everybody knew that this European without borders-thing is going to be truly – ”fantastique” – that’s ”French” for ph!)

Yeah the idea that Brexit was largely about London and elites is silly. People who voted leave generally have strong opinions about Brussels, are not afraid to share them (god I wish they were), have held those opinions for a really long time and there are a lot of the bastards.

I suspect, based upon anecdotal data, that floating voters (low information, not necessarily going to turn out) may have tended to vote against the status quo. Or rather they voted for Leave because the establishment were for it. But they’re going to be a minority of voters.

“I’m Marxian, which means half apocalyptic pessimist and half Utopian radical. They have healed also the hurt of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.”

So Bob, again the lack of shared assumptions makes too much engagement futile (at least in the context of comment thread). But it seems to me that, while you guys can still argue that Marxism hasn’t really been tried and would be great – I mean, I can’t conclusively disprove that – the whole “heighten the contradictions” thing has been pretty much conclusively disproved by history.

Which is to say that from your perspective I can see the reason for the apocalyptic pessimism, but not really the case for utopian optimism. Whatever comes next won’t be your marxist utopia.

Now, I’m more optimistic that you are about the possibility that some version (hopefully more humane) of the current system will survive the current unpleasantness. I know you don’t buy that vision, or particularly want it (but as an alternative to a fascist kleptocracy I would think that even you would find it somewhat preferable). We’re lucky in that regard that Trump is in many ways an idiotic buffoon; a smarter / better informed / less lazy person with his odious world view could possibly have much more successfully consolidated the low information persuadable “center,” such as it is.

But I guess the one thing I really don’t get … for all of the many manifest problems of meliorist liberalism, I would think that the fact that the material circumstances of the proletariat in western Europe over the past half century plus – in world historical terms it’s never been better – would give you at least SOME as to your rejection of meliorism. Even if it doesn’t come close to your utopian radicalism.

P. S. The comparisons I insist on making aren’t “pretty stupid” (Ben 121). You don’t need a time machine to learn about living conditions in earlier times. There are statistics you can look up, indicators you can compare. Go ahead, don’t be so lazy, do some actual work to support your claims, show us some evidence that things have gotten worse since the 1960s!

‘Trump’s vulgarity, more than his wealth and his love for beauty queens, is where the unwashed bond with the president – reveling in the disdain showered down upon them by their ‘betters,’ such as you’

The vulgarity that includes racism, sexism, multiple accusations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, dodgy business dealings, screwing contractors, separating families at the border and locking up the children and screwing up the process of reunifying them, attacking black sportsmen for kneeling, calling a black female politician ‘low IQ,’ gutting health care, funneling enormous wealth towards corporate shareholders via tax cuts, cutting swathes of environmental and consumer regulations and protections – those and all the other vulgar things you self-described unwashed bond with him over. I dunno, I think people who don’t bond over those things are, in fact, ‘better.’

Or wait? @129
and:
”I don’t understand any of this”.

I once met an hairdresser from Detroit who told me that US Car Companies killed nearly every good hair salon in Detroit -(with the exception of some Salons in Bloomfield Hills)

and I didn’t understand that either – as what does ”hair” have to do with Car Companies – and the hairdresser told me:

”Dummy – where there is no Car Manufacturing anymore – there are is nooo Salon to do the workers women hair – anymore?

And so perhaps the statistic that you quoted forgot all the… hairdressers?

Manufacturing jobs have been on a consistent decline since 1950 due to productivity increases.

Not much inclined or equipped to argue this in detail, so let’s just say I don’t buy “productivity” measurements or most mainstream economics. Is finance more “productive” than ditch digging? Well, the hedge funder makes zillions per year, so must be.

Reading two books now, one about the protectionist high tariff “American School*,” and another about the history of the Syrian economy, historicizing the high gov’t spending controlled Keynesian economy of the 50s and 60s and the turn to privatization and neoliberalism after the USSR went down. You know, the common postwar story where in one era schools roads dams and hospitals got built, and then the one when a few oligarchs got very rich and the masses immiserated and politics went right and crazed. Oh, did you remember I was talking Syria?

Given a choice where one “Versailles elitist” gets shot and ten peasants get land reform, healthcare, and literacy I’ll be a monster if liberals won’t deliver or get out of my way.

*Interested folk can search for themselves.

@ engels

“Note to Americans and others: please don’t confuse the cranks who comment here with British public opinion:”

The reason immigration is less of an issue in the UK and people are more positive to immigrants since the referendum is because we’ve voted to Leave and so take back control of immigration. It was always about numbers and jobs, not about different people.

@ Chris Bertram

“So the “mirrored” claim is a case of taking one of the most extreme instances of change and representing it as typical”.

I didn’t claim other towns were identical. You have identified 16 other areas with significant increases in immigrant populations. That’s quite a lot.

I get that cities are international. I get that skilled and professional people moving around is a good thing. But what is it that is so important and beneficial that it requires a sudden inrush of large numbers of immigrants to Harlow, to Kettering, to Northampton, to small town after small town, to do? Since when has the Left supported employers’ rights to fill jobs at whatever low rates they wish to offer?

There is a widespread sense of betrayal, in a gut feeling way. The government treats the people as expendable, as replaceable. Why train so few nurses and Doctors? Why bring in people to do jobs rather than training our own? If your government doesn’t represent you, isn’t ambitious for you, keeps shoving you aside and bringing in some shiny new folk who are so much better than you, then you have nothing, no chances, no options, nothing to work for.

The Brexit vote was a chance to at last have a government that the people could hold to account. None of this “sorry – EU rules” excuse whenever people asked for anything. Needles stop say the fight back has been intense. It is absolutely essential now that a proper Brexit takes place, or else a lot of people are just left with no power, no way of holding politicans to account, no prospect of a future in which their opinions, their ambitions, matter. I cannot begin to tell you just how furious many people are at the campaign to reverse Brexit and how angry they will be if their vote is ignored or taken away from them.

@139
”I do sneer at the Versailles liberal/conservative”

– but what’s about the Versailles a… holes?
What’s about them –
”the Versailles Trumpists” –
you got to sneer at them – as you always tell us – that they love to be sneered at?

@ Chris W 131

“some (dipper here for example) think that xenophobia is excusable or even reasonable.”

I haven’t said that and don’t think it. Please retract.

@ harry b. A friend gave me the full low-down on his Polish heritage that I hadn’t appreciated. When Hitler invaded Poland from the west Stalin came in from the East, and Stalin rounded up and deported anyone who had been involved in local politics, so a significant influx of Poles with political affiliations from the Eastern part came to the UK.

My friend has a PhD and voted to Leave the EU by the way.

To nastywoman @65,
Once we pretend that there is such a thing as a “good billionaire”, we invite others to imagine that there are “benign fascists,” “benevolent mobsters,” and “constructive police brutality.” Besides, Trump’s appeal is that he is supposedly The Good Billionaire. One thing I appreciate about the young leftists on Tumblr and Reddit is that they have learnt to say, “There are no good billionaires.” There are only less offensive ones.

Dipper @72:
“The Toriy [sic] polling have remained remarkably strong and stable possibly because both Remainers and Leavers supported May and because Corbyn is unelectable.”

This sentence reads like it was written by a fourteen-year-old schoolboy trying desperately to get some kind of credit for writing a sad little page of buzzwords; not aught that would convince any adult conversant with present UK politics.

“When Hitler invaded Poland from the west Stalin came in from the East, and Stalin rounded up and deported anyone who had been involved in local politics, so a significant influx of Poles with political affiliations from the Eastern part came to the UK”

Yes, we all knew this. There were left wing (fled Hitler) and right wing (fled Stalin) families, and in the late 70s those differences were still understood by the kids. Interestingly, from my fb feeds, I discern that only one of my friends from that school voted to leave. But they have mainly stayed pretty close to Slough.

Dipper if you want evidence of the lies that got people voting for brexit look at your own comments here, which have been wrong on every substantial fact. Look also at your responses to correction which have also been wrong (eg you correct me for saying the population of Harlow is not increasing when I said it was increasing and gave the amount and compared it with population growth from other causes). You can’t read, you can’t analyse, you can’t think, you believe every lie the daily mail tells you and then repeat then uncritically, and cannot change your ideas when shown they are completely wrong. You complain that the infrastructure isn’t there for even moderate population growth and vote for the party that destroys infrastructure because of foreigners. Yes you were lied to and now you come here and lie to us.

Cian contradicts TM by pointing out the welfare states of France, Germany, Sweden etc. Where are they? So the people of the UK are voting to leave the “neoliberal” EU so they can have a welfare state more like … All the states of the EU? Think about how stupid that is. Second only to your misrepresentation of TMS point as “rich societies must be patriarchal.” Really, this is primary school debate class stuff.

Right. Some of us didn’t live in the 60s but, nonetheless, life was s**t ‘cos statistics and indicators. I grew up in the ‘post war, post fascistic world’ and was bloody glad of it! To imply that, somehow, that was a bad thing is stunningly inane: life expectancy was “somewhat precarious” in the world of war and fascism, doncha know?

On the positive side it’s grand that there is such concern for the working class and its “gains”. But, true to the age of the classless society we just have to assume the working class is actually the target of the “best of all possible worlds” Theory that’s been thrashing about in these comments.

And. Yep. What a cliche our lives were. I worked in a factory in the Golden Times, doing an apprenticeship in heavy industry. All my family worked. We were “skilled” (not as skilled as people today, of course!) including my mum, who also (gulp) worked in a factory (and, yes, she was paid less. That was as shit then as it is now). We loved the long hours, the dirt, the noise, the shit pay, the Maypoles and the Unicorns. Oh, uppity us, how we wished for a “clean job”. And. When we finally got one, it made all the difference to our tired, cliched, stunted, savage, working class lives. Hurrah! Glad to help youse make your point, Sir.

If only. If only, the folk whose lives are sliding away from them these days could just remember the ‘high base’ they’ve come from and just get that the issue is actually one of psychology! Gratitude, people!

The argument that the Right want to return “us” (who, exactly?) to the 60s is just silly. They certainly want to maintain the “old verities”, regain their “lost glories” and return to the “proper order of things”. But. That wasn’t exactly in the 50s or 60s. This is a far older fight; this is something far more visceral.

John Freeman, Junior Minister in the 1945 Labour government: ‘I have not forgotten the tension of rising of rising to answer questions or conduct a debate under the cold implacable eyes of that row of well-tailored tycoons, who hated the Labour government with a passion and fear which made them dedicated men in their determination to get it out of office and to limit the damage it could do to the world which they saw as theirs by right’ (quoted in Kynaston, 2007).

J.G. Ballard mentions how ‘middle class people … talked as if this Labour government was an occupying power, that the Bolsheviks had arrived and were to strip them of everything they owned’. Kynaston talks of the ‘atavistic loathing’ of the middle classes, and of the ‘strong, almost tribal middle-class, backlash’ against the Labour government in 1946.

What? Who’ll do our shit-work, now? Uppity oiks that they are. The loathing, of course, sprang into being, fully formed, in – what? 1951, or thereabouts? Of course it didn’t. It forms the very plumbing in the walls of British “life”.

Talk about old pipes rattling in dank walls … Anthony Heap, middle-class diarist (1961): ‘Latest immigration figures show that West Indians flock into this overcrowded country at a higher rate than ever … But, does the Government heed the pleas from MPs, local authorities and other public bodies to restrict immigration on account of the acute housing and health problems created by this ever-increasing influx? No. Cravenly cowed by the leftist parrot cry of “no colour bar”, they won’t do a damned thing about it …’ (Quoted in Kynaston, 2015). Remind you of anyone nowadays? Kynaston referred to Heap as ‘impeccably bigoted’. Great turn of phrase, that.

And. Brexit. Tories decided on the “goodnesses” of the Common Market. The impacts of entry were assessed by the Lord Chancellor in the early 60s, but, apparently, not shared broadly: ‘(a) Parliament would be required to surrender some of its functions to the organs of the Community. (b) The Crown would be called on to transfer part of its treaty making power to those organs. (c) Our courts of law would sacrifice some degree of independence by becoming subordinate in certain respects to the European Court of Justice. In the long run, we shall have to decide whether the economic factors require us to make some sacrifices of sovereignty. My concern is to ensure that we should see exactly what it is we are being called on to sacrifice, and how serious our loss would be’ (ibid).

It’s a very long road and a very battered can, but, kicking it around all these years has been such fun. Look how far we’ve come! Oh! Right. But. Nice gadgets we’ve got now though, eh? And. Look on the Bright Side: We’re gonna get Freedom, Sovereignity and Unlimited Impeccable Bigotry, too. This Is The Future. Haven’t we done well?

I left the UK over 40 years ago. I’m bloody miffed at missing out on all the brill times back in good ol’ blighty. Not.

As my final comment and reply to same fair criticism. I’ll pose this question:

Leaving aside the truth problems facing the majority who predicted wrongly that Brexit would fail, the Brexit would be catastrophic, that Trump would never run, that Trump couldn’t win the nomination, that Trump couldn’t win the election, and that having won election Trump would rule by executive order ending elections, that the world economy would collapse, that Trump would resign, that Trump would be forced from power via the 25th amendment, that Trump would start WWIII, etc. etc….let’s say after being so spectacularly wrong about all or some of the above, the much-better educated and intelligent start being right. What would being right look like exactly?

@149 Clearly I’ve struck a nerve with the Versailles liberal tag. But credit due, you have at least tried to formulate what a Versailles Trumpster might look like. FWIW, I whole-heartedly agree – Donald, and perhaps some of his family members is what a Versailles Trumpster is. The problem is I can’t think of any others.

To be clear: the Versailles liberal and the Versailles conservative are the same in most respects; both share the same view – they’re better than everyone else by virtue of intelligence, hard work, and all other measures and therefore damn well justified in believing they are in fact the best.

What distinguishes the Versailles liberal from the Versailles conservative is detailed in part in the linked Atlantic article above. I suggest the interested read it. The Versailles conservative does not pretend any affection for the lower orders, or interest in their lives. The Versailles conservative loves globalization because of higher profits for 401 ks, etc. The Versailles liberal pretends to care for the lower orders, just not white, working-class, male, and without a college education, type lower-orders. But actually cares only about his/her progress within the Versailles hierarchies.

Progress might involve pretending to care. Harvard is currently trying to defend their practice of racial selection by diversifying the student body by heading into Trump country. Hey, look everyone!
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/30/bacow-promises-more-outward-looking-harvard/775WSyrNerKqGh8B06TM2O/story.html

Finally (oh let it be so), I did not employ the term ‘spitting’ on, but I’m well aware that the Versailles conservative has no regard for me or my well-being, a point I thought I made clearly when I stated that the Versailles liberal and the Versailles conservative are two sides of the same effete coin. The Versailles conservative doesn’t care and doesn’t pretend to, the Versailles liberal tells him/herself and all the world that getting along with ‘ordinary folks’ is what makes life worth living. Pure BS. What makes life worth living is getting your kid into Stanford, etc. But on occasion one must pretend. So we find Michelle Obama accidentally encountering photographers when doing her ‘usual’ shopping at Target.

@146 is entirely right about the rich.

As it turns I’ve been recently researching the use of portable cuspidors in ‘better’ society during the 19th century. So spit away!

TM @ 130

“P. S. The comparisons I insist on making aren’t “pretty stupid” (Ben 121). You don’t need a time machine to learn about living conditions in earlier times. There are statistics you can look up, indicators you can compare. Go ahead, don’t be so lazy, do some actual work to support your claims, show us some evidence that things have gotten worse since the 1960s!”

Now you’re not just pretty stupid but utterly stupid. By your logic the majority of the human race, even slum dwellers in Bombay and workers on 18 hour days in Bangladesh, are better off than Louis XIV because they have mobile phones. Propagandists for capitalism at the time of the Industrial Revolution also liked to make the argument that the new wage-slaves working long hours in the cotton mills were better off than when they were farming because they enjoyed higher wages.

As someone pointed out in another comment, people in 1960 had confidence that things were getting better, in terms of housing, health, working hours and conditions, personal liberties. That makes a big difference to someone’s mental outlook and political attitudes. Now relatively few people can say that they are looking forward to improvements in these fields, there is much greater insecurity, material and existential, and politics and social life are much more unstable.

@152
What a wonderful – wonderful response!
(seriously!)

and about my fellow comedian ph

Yes – the ”Versailles-Shtick” – needs some improvement and perhaps we can ask Stewart or some of the writers of Colbert?

Are you reading us guys??!!!

No?

Well – then I might have to tell – that it really doesn’t work as well as the FF von Clownstick synonym – that’s faaaar more funny and the ”Ballon Man Baby” in Britain or ”the American Idiot on Nr. 1 of the charts – really beats Versailles by a few ”Mirror Halls” -(if you get my joke?)
And about the:
”I’ll pose this question”:

What was the question – again?

Some big picture perspective from German economist Wolfgang Streek:

https://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end

While I’m here I’ll add that Dipper’s claims about having the longest waits in the country are also untrue. He referenced Accident and Emergency waiting times, but these are only a small part of how waiting times are assessed. The larger and more important waiting time issue is access to outpatient care and non-emergency surgery in inpatient care. Outpatient care is where your first appointment for cancer treatment occurs for example, where almost all HIV management occurs, etc. The waiting times for access to this care are shocking in the UK, but they are far worse in other parts of the UK than in Harlow. These waiting times are assessed not at hospital level but at the level of clinical commissioning group (CCG), since they involve more than one hospital and their interactions with general practitioners and private specialists. I mentioned this above, but South east UK CCGs are not in the top 10 waiting times by this measure. Dipper’s local hospital may be shit at managing A&E, but it’s doing a great job on broader waiting times. Why? Some might say this reflects good staffing (probably a lot of European doctors and nurses!) but more likely it reflects a well functioning local GP system. But this story doesn’t suit Dipper’s narrative of migrants from the EU overwhelming local services so he doesn’t mention it.

It’s also worth noting the full implications of the A&E waiting times issue. Dipper wants to claim that this is becuase of all the migrants. But as I showed above there are two areas in the South East with much much larger migrant populations and just as large growth in migrant populations as Harlow. These areas don’t have long waiting times. So are Harlow’s local hospital A&E waiting times really a function of the increase in population it has seen over the past 10 years (10% in 10 years), or are they a consequence of other local factors that Dipper doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know?

The UK’s public services were destroyed by the Tories, the same party that brought on Brexit and don’t know how to manage it. They did all this without losing power because they convinced people like Dipper that the migrants were to blame, not the “perfectly tailored tycoons on the front bench”. Dipper has been lied to repeatedly, and believed it because the story about how everything is Johnny Foreigner’s fault suits his predispositions. He has then come on here repeatedly over the past two years to repeat those lies. He’s incapable of understanding what is happening around him and unwilling to try. This attitude – just like the attitude of the holier-than-thou leftists above who are outraged at the suggestion life is better now than in the era of smallpox and polio and coal dust and emphysema and dead babies and wife beating – is an absolute gift to the Tories. They love it when you repeat their lies – they didn’t even have to squander their ill-gotten Russian money to make you do it. Are you proud of yourselves?

@162
Yeah – but sadly – like most of us – he just likes to talk about ”us” –
or what he calls ”rich, highly industrialized—or better, increasingly deindustrialized—capitalist countries”.

For somebody who prefers to call such ”increasingly deindustrialized—capitalist countries” – ”Consumer” Countries – and really knows a little bit about ”Predominant Producing” Countries -(where ”capitalism” can be as ”new and exciting” as in China – as a lot of Chinese think – and NOT necessarily ME) – Streeks’s outlook is faaar too pessimistic – like when he brings up the bust of ”our” housing bubble of 2008 -(as one of the major ”pre-plays” for a lot of his Doom Predictions) – he just forgets how – for example – China currently deals with probably an even YUUUGER housing bubble – in a completely ”non-capitalistic” way – by just not letting any self-destructive ”busting market forces” collapse the whole deal.

So – if the guy starts writing also about – how ”capitalism” will end up for ”Producing” Countries – now that could really be some BIG picture perspective?

Faustusnotes: As ever you seem to battling the strawmen that haunt your fevered imagination.

I don’t think that membership of the EU has anything to do with whether a country has a decent welfare state. That would be weird. Nor do I think anyone particularly in the UK was voting to leave the EU because they thought would get a better welfare state. And before you make one of your assumptions – I voted remain.

If I misrepresented TM’s point, I misrepresented it as “more equal societies must be patriarchal”. Your paraphrase (“rich societies must be patriarchal”) doesn’t make any sense for the point either he, or I, were trying to make. Seriously – READ WHAT PEOPLE WRITE, before slagging them off. It would be nice if you could also be less rude, but if you feed rudeness is an integral part of your personality at least do people the courtesy of trying to understand their arguments.

Faustusnotes: I suspect that if he were given the choice Louis xv would choose to remain king in his era rather than be a sweatshop worker in Bangladesh in the modern era.

I also think the relevance of any of this to brexit is pretty questionable.

ph@:154

The Versailles conservative doesn’t care and doesn’t pretend to, the Versailles liberal tells him/herself and all the world that getting along with ‘ordinary folks’ is what makes life worth living. Pure BS.

You’re expat, right? I suppose that might be why you only see the loudest-shouted, sanitized pontifications from our betters. But even accepting that, “they’re both equally bad, but some are more equal than others” is not a convincing assertion.

The way that the Versailles conservatives shows solidarity with their foot soldiers is not by expressing concern about their financial well-being (the shock of hearing that might loosen their grip on their bootstraps, after all), but rather by signaling shared virtues WRT patriotism, morals, and culture. Thus, we have e.g. old-money Yale-and-Harvard alumnus George W. Bush as an aw-shucks, jus’folks guy you’d like to have a beer with, even as his mother is perhaps a bit too honest about how she won’t be troubling her “beautiful mind” about the American servicemembers who shan’t be coming home from invading Iraq.

But of course, it should be obvious that the same language and tropes are not used on both sides of the spectrum. The right, long invested in declaring “class war” something they simply don’t do, are not going to use the language of class war to convince their peons of their solidarity; they use the language of culture war. Even as they value going to the right schools with the right people, they disparage the “overeducated” to focus their followers’ ire on their political rivals and not them. Your unwillingness to notice this is standard divide-and-rule smoke-and-mirrors as employed by the rich as a whole rather than some particular curse of liberal hypocrites does not change the prevalence of callousness coupled with virtue signaling from American elites of all stripes.

@165
”I have no idea what your point is”.

The point is:

Don’t be ”the silly Brit” in the joke about:

”a Brit who moves to the ”Turkish” part of Berlin… and then in the hospital he sees all of these… oh my god… Turks? – and he complains to the arriving ”German” doctor –
(a friend of mine!) –
about all these ”Foreigners” – and the German doctor –
(a friend of mine)
nods and says: Yes – far too many Brits…

And that is NOT supposed to be ”analysis” –
That’s supposed to be… ”entertaining”!

I’ve nothing new to add but will reply to@ 172 and @173, if I may.

@172 I fear we’re talking past one another, at best. Your rich dividing etc. is so general and so commonplace that it tells us nothing, I fear. There’s little doubt that rich Saudis play their part in influencing elections in the US and elsewhere. Non-state actors also pay to influence elections here and there, and campaigns to divide and conquer are part and parcel of all politics. The 2007 primary campaign of Obama exploited African-American antipathy to gay lifestyles to pry lose significant sections from the Clinton grip on African-American voters. That’s not apples to apples, but fear campaigns are part and parcel of politics. I’ve explicitly stated that I see no difference between elites repeatedly (see my support for @146), so I’m not entirely sure why you insist I claim the opposite.
We’re done.

@173 You raise a fair point regarding the lowest orders in terms of income, but even there the spread is lower than we might expect. I took a look at a few different studies of exit polls and settled on Nate Silver’s primarily because there’s no paywall and he addresses income and education among other factors. His post-election analysis seems to me much stronger than his predictive skills, as we might expect.

I’ve mentioned that social and cultural capital matter. The Atlantic article on the Versailles liberal makes clear that post-secondary education is the true marker of the 9 percent. By that metric you’re entirely wrong. The lower orders voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The data is quite striking. Well worth a look. Nothing further to add.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

nastywoman@133: that, at least, we have an answer to: mercantilism; trade policy whereby Germany impoverishes its trading partners.

It helps to have the sympathies of the European Central Bank, too.

@ faustusnotes

“You said your town went from 4% to 21% non-UK born, and I pointed out that your town went from 5% to 15%. That’s a large difference.”

No. Go to the ONS link . Scroll down to the map. Find Harlow and click on it. Non UK born 2017 21%. Change in non-UK born, 2007 to 2017, 17%.

Harlow as a town is not growing greatly in population because it cannot. Further growth is in areas that are not Harlow, so 10,000 homes over the River Stort in Gilston Park (aka Harlow North), continued expansion of New Hall and development of Churchgate Street to the east, two massive developments at Bishop’s Stortford, and large new towns proposed at Dunmow and Braintree.

If waiting times in A&E are not important how come they were all over the news at Christmas? a 25% birthrate to immigrant mothers (ONS 2015) is a pipeline of 25% of school places to immigrant children, 25% of childcare in hospitals and social services, which are costs. I’m not passing judgement in this paragraph, I’m just pointing out the numbers.

Dipper:

I have no reason to retract anything. You presented an increase of the foreign-born population from 4 to 21% in 10 years (whatever the actual, apparently disputed, numbers might be) as inherently problematic in some way and what you write is fully invested in metaphors of migration as a natural catastrophe (flood, influx etc.). I don’t know if you’re presenting your own opinions or those of a prototypical Leave voter in your home town, but in any event these obviously xenophobic ideas are presented by you with sympathy.

Sure, you try to mitigate by saying it’s about infrastructure, but in the same breath you write that in reality there are no major infrastructure problems, other than some that adequate financial and capital investment management of the NHS would eliminate (the hospital needs upgrading, if I understand you correctly).

I grew up with this sort of distorted xenophobic line of thinking. In Germany, when I was an older teen, it was first asylum seekers. I grew up in a highrise, where my step-mother could afford buying a flat because they were being sold off by her (big company) employer, to preferential prices. The city also bought a bunch of the flats, and the tittering and pearl-clutching started right away: the rumour was they wanted to put, gasp, asylum seekers in them. And indeed, the asylum seekers materialized and so did the anticipated negative impacts. The biggest complaint was the noise. See, they put one family per bedroom, and many had small children. They didn’t bother putting carpet down on the floor, and the families, with nothing to do and unsure of their welcome outside, spent their days holed up inside. With toddlers that kept running to and fro over the uncarpeted concrete floor. Nuisance of nuisances. (Luckily at one point the homeowner’s representative managed to get the point across, the city had carpet lain in their flats, the asylum seekers turned out to be quite normal people, and they started to dare to let the kids play in the communal sandboxes…) Then the war in Yugoslavia brought much larger numbers of refugees, most meant to be temporary. It was confusing! There were so many different refugee groups. Some people hated the Serbians because of the massacres. Others liked the Serbians because they had stood with Hitler. There were Croatians and Kosovans and Bosnians, some of which were Muslim etc. etc. And some of the groups, surprise!, didn’t like each other. Everyone had a favorite story of some refugee home for [disliked group X] being vandalized, or some other transgression with respect to local people. My ears perked up when I realized that, my federal state having objected to taking in as many refugees, they had proceeded to install refugee camps for thousands of people (who received no or very little cash, had no right to work, and basically nothing they could legally do) right next to villages of maybe 500 rural Germans. If you *wanted* to trigger clashes, this would have been the best approach…. Later, there still were a lot of Kosovo Albanians seeking refuge. I could tell many more stories of this type, which come down to: authorities, out of incompetence or ill will, create a tension-prone situation, or manage a challenge in a way that creates unnecessary tensions, which then are blamed on the migrants. It’s too transparent a ploy to work any longer on me, sorry.

What it (= xenophobia etc.) comes down to, for me, is: who do you include under “we”. When you talk about these Polish families, clearly they are not part of your “we”. You don’t feel responsible for them. What if, say, a similar population increase had been triggered, rather suddenly, by some catastrophe that made it necessary for the population of a large English city to move out over a short term? Would you feel the same, given similar challenges on infrastructure or services, or would THEY be part of your “we” in a way EU migrants aren’t? This is something to ponder.

Last, #138 “The reason immigration is less of an issue in the UK [compared to the US] and people are more positive to immigrants since the referendum …” Are you kidding us? Sure, you’ll find people in the US that are just as xenophobic as the best EDL member, especially with the current climate. But overall, it’s the UK for which there’s hardly a day without news of people being harassed on the streets for speaking Polish, or French; people getting deportation notes despite being married to a British citizen and having had indefinite leave to remain for ages; researchers getting deportation notices because their visa is invalidated by too many absences from the country, said absences being for the purpose of carrying out research that the British taxpayer is funding; stuff like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05632-w … I lived in the UK from 2006 to 2011, and it was a good time, I thought. Now, I’m just glad I’m out of there. Clearly people like me aren’t wanted any longer. I’m bitter about it. Also, what you forget is that he principal targed of US racism are native-borne people, first and foremost Native Americans and the descendants of enslaved people, and by extension all African-Americans. For all the terrible things, anti-foreigner xenophobia comes way after that. Also, much unlike Britain, you’ll also find in the US (and even more so Canada) full-throated defenses of immigration as a good thing. Polls come out as more than 50% pro-immigration even these days. Try that in England, or Germany for that matter.

As an aside, it’s amazing how many people here pretend not to understand the concept of comparison. The idea to use the year 1960 as a reference wasn’t mine, it was proposed by SamChevre at 44. But if you embrace the claim that things were better then, you *are* making a comparison between now and then. And what many comments here show is that those who take that perspective really have no clue and also aren’t really interested in the the actualyl lived experience of the time. It’s really just a leftist version of a golden age myth.

“His post-election analysis seems to me much stronger than his predictive skills, as we might expect”

If you are talking about his prediction of the election result, this seems unfair. In the several days (and at many times in the several weeks) before election day he was giving Trump a 20% chance of victory. That is, if you ran the election 10 times, he would win twice. If anything, I think this overstated Trump’s chances. Trump won by a sliver — everything that could possibly go right for him did, and everything that could possibly go wrong for his opponent, did. When the electoral college loser wins the popular vote by a small amount you can reasonably say “Oh, well, that’s only because the winner campaigned strategically (Bush/Gore)”. But when they win the popular vote by such a large margin as Clinton did, it is very hard to think that’s the reason. So, I think Silver deserves a lot of credit. His estimate of Trump’s chances of victory was much higher than almost any other non-delusional person’s.

I remember predicting a month before the election that Trump could win, because the polls had narrowed in response to several campaign events.

After the indictment of 12 GRU for hacking the Clinton campaign etc, I now imagine that Trump will be charged with felony federal conspiracy, either as accessory (if he got a heads-up before the fact) or because you can’t claim the willful blindness defense (if after the fact).

Harry B @185

Silver’s analysis of his own failings post-election were also very impressive. He identified what he got wrong and why he got it wrong.

@175 faustusnotes

The argument appears to be that technological advancements, as you put it:

“improved environmental protections, increased life expectancy, massive reductions in infant and maternal mortality, reliable access to contraception, routine availability of health care, and vastly improved communications and transport”

outweigh the social, political, and economic stagnation experienced by large swaths of the developed world since the end of “Les Trente Glorieuses” such that it is illiberal to base a movement on reverting to that era politically. Is that not what you and TM are saying? That we shouldn’t want to “go back” in time because there have been vast improvements in the intervening years which either wouldn’t have happened or will have to be given up?

Setting aside how the argument is basically the same argument conservatives make in response to left claims about the current state of wealth and income inequality in the developed world (e.g. Scott Winship, “The Big Lebowski Defense”, https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2015/03/25/the-big-lebowski-defense. “Edsall and the liberal researchers he interviewed (many of whom I like a lot, for the record) all want us to focus on relative poverty rather than absolute poverty—to view people as no less poor even if everyone’s income doubles over time. They are welcome to prefer looking at that kind of a measure, which blurs the distinction between material hardship and income inequality. But no one provides any reason to privilege it over looking at material hardship. “), I don’t even get why it’s being brought up unless there is a belief that the “absolute” improvements are either “because of” the neoliberal policy regime (I use the word only because TM used it @77) or could not have happened under the “Trente Glorieuses” political regime (leaving open the possibility something other than neoliberalism would have made the improvements possible).

What evidence is there that we had to make a trade off, which was either a conscious decision at the time or evident in hindsight?

Since the post war era was a time of incredible progress and advancement in all of the areas you identified, what makes you believe that sort of advancement would have been unable to continue?

I mean, talk about disingenuous rubbish. The whole idea we have to choose between ALL of 1960 vs. ALL of 2018 is ridiculous. It’s based on a thinly veiled assumption about the driving force behind material improvements in peoples’ lives over the last few decades and says the collapse in the relative standard of living was a necessary trade off for the improvements in absolute standards of living. Not to mention the sly implication those who want to see a future which resembles elements of the past are somehow the same as right wing reactionaries who want some imagined past that never existed. When it’s the people making the “look at the improvements in absolute standard living” argument who are literally parroting the arguments those on the American right make to try and dismiss those on the left who claim the need to address relative inequality between people in the same political unit, living in the same period of time, is vitally important.

@193

‘The US DOJ today indicted 12 Russian GRU officers for offenses which they claim are connected to the alleged hacking and leaking of Democratic party documents in 2016. Further claims of alleged GRU efforts to manipulate the 2016 US election are contained in the indictment.’

FTFY

After the indictment of 12 GRU for hacking the Clinton campaign etc, I now imagine that Trump will be charged with felony federal conspiracy, either as accessory (if he got a heads-up before the fact) or because you can’t claim the willful blindness defense (if after the fact).

It is unlikely that Trump or his senior henchmen will ever be indicted. America is a Republican country (Democrats are only allowed to pretend to lead it on an irregular basis) and no Republican will tolerate the prosecution of one of their own kind for transgressions that led to the capture of power from the (Democratic) Other. The fact that the Party seized power absolves all crimes.

A Democratic president with the same degree of connections to a hostile foreign power would have already been impeached, convicted, tried, and imprisoned. Or, perhaps, assassinated.

In the unlikely case that Trump is indicted or impeached, then serious mass violence is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Trump is seen by boorish Republicans as a savior figure; his detractors are at best, the Other. Any punishment of Trump will be seen as a blasphemous usurpation potentially worthy of an armed response.

@179 I’ve re-read the sections of the linked article on the role education and geography play in the creation of America’s new aristocracy.

First, my argument requires no paraphrase. I’m saying both parts of the 9.9 percent, (and the 1 percent) are equally indifferent to those below them in the social order. Where I’ve overstated the case, as in Brexit, I’ve acknowledged the error, and reformulated my claim.

Your@179 is as poorly-constructed as my worst off-the cuff typo-riddled vent, which is too bad since you seem to have put (some?) considerable effort into the comment. I won’t say your argument is absurd (as you do mine), but it does seem to be built to make the Versailles liberal some kind of victim.

The result is that you’re making my own argument, rather than your own. The Versailles conservative believes quite openly that poor people are poor because they don’t work hard enough. The Versailles conservative argues that stable families, faith, hard work, and education will life anyone up. The Versailles liberal believes something similar, but asserts the opposite. That’s the distinction, and this distinction requires no paraphrase.

Worse (for you) is the fact that many/most immigrant families embrace the values expounded by the Versailles conservative very strongly, in my experience. I spend a fair amount of time in Europe. I visit a Turkish restaurant on occasion near a national library. One wall is filled with a large (tacky?) painting of an entire family bundled into one rickety bed, umbrellas protecting the elderly and the young from the rain dripping in from the holes in the roof – the caption ‘together we can do anything.’

As for your ‘divide and conquer’ nonsense, that’s what Russia is trying to do. There’s nothing particularly wrong, or novel about this sort of interference. One of the main metrics I used to judge the probability of a Trump victory was actual evidence of enthusiasm. I watched reporters standing for hours in long-lines of entirely ordinary Americans patiently waiting for a place inside a Trump rally, across America, throughout 2015-2016. Hillary was outspending Trump 40 to 1 in battleground states. And the first female president TM failed to convince a great many women that she’d do a better job than the beauty pageant entrepreneur. But there’s really no need to go over this, again.

@186 harry b. That’s a fair comment. However, I did get it right, and I wasn’t the only one. We hear what we want to hear and as the LA Times observes, plenty of Democrats in 2016 didn’t want to hear that Donald Trump was going to win. The filters are still in place.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-usc-latimes-poll-20161108-story.html

And that really is it.

Journalist Marcy Wheeler’s (@emptywheel) timeline and account of what is known so far of the hack, updated with information from the new indictments.

Key point:

Wheeler – “I have been saying forever that the easiest way to steal the election would be to steal Hillary’s analytics.”

Indictment – “In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test applications related to the DNC’s analytics.”

It is looking more and more like the Russians successfully interfered with the US Presidential election.

We now return you to our regular Brexit flamewar.

Well, it is now looking like “her emails” was indeed the important story of 2016 because it indicated a criminal lack of computer security in the Clinton campaign and DNC. One might hope the next Democratic candidate gains a better grasp of responsibility from this Russian operation, but since the Clinton apologists, still fighting for power, are seeing this as an excuse rather than a catastrophic failure I doubt it. #Notherfault is the forever meme.

You goddamn don’t get excuses for losing entire countries.

@188 Lee, you were/are one of the few sober observers of 2015/6. Indeed, twas thanks to you that I first watched a Trump rally. I’d caution anyone to think carefully about what you just wrote.

‘Kennedy is a Russian stooge!’ – 1963, John Birth Society. “Wanted for Treason!”
‘Trump is a Russian stooge! – 2018, Crooked Timber commenters.

There has never in the history of the United States, or any other major western power, a precedent of the kind you’re suggesting. Never is a very big word in this case. Galactic, in fact. And, and Lee, you’re all in for the conspiracy theory? Really?

I can’t frankly see the Democratic party emerging from this episode unscathed. Forget the fact that the timing of the announcement coincides exactly with the testimony of senior FBI officials promising to interfere in the election and prevent a Trump victory. No need for links. Marcy Wheeler, whatever her skills, is a dedicated partisan.

So, we once more we are treated to the spectacle of self-described skeptical and sober academics confusing a charging document with a judgement, assertion for fact, and conjecture for evidence. Worse the conjecture is that a sitting US president conspired with the Russian GRU to steal the US election and effectively turn over control of the US government to Vladimir Putin.

COULD BE TRUE!!!! SO, WHAT’S YOUR EXPLANATION, HUH??????

After 2016, I didn’t frankly imagine sensible people could become any sillier, but I was wrong – again.

“After the indictment of 12 GRU for hacking the Clinton campaign etc, I now imagine that Trump will be charged with felony federal conspiracy, either as accessory (if he got a heads-up before the fact) or because you can’t claim the willful blindness defense (if after the fact).”

Coz this is so what happens every time a US president gets caught conspiring with Russia to overturn US elections. Remember?

Bob’s comment is a thing of beauty, the perfect encapsulation of the Putin friendly lefts current derangement. He’s gone from “Russia didn’t do it” to “Russia did it and it’s the DNC at fault for being hacked, and the Republicans were right about Hilary s emails all along.”

This is the modern American old school left, folks. They’d rather sell their country to a Putin controlled party of oligarchs than let a democrat win. Even the most egregiously treacherous and corrupt scumbag in the system is preferable to a left wing woman, so long as they get their 60s protectionism back.

ph@198:

Your@179 is as poorly-constructed as my worst off-the cuff typo-riddled vent, which is too bad since you seem to have put (some?) considerable effort into the comment. I won’t say your argument is absurd (as you do mine), but it does seem to be built to make the Versailles liberal some kind of victim.

You’re getting increasingly nasty, condescending, and unwilling to engage with your own prior arguments (let alone my current ones) as you’ve continued along on this thread.

You’ve now claimed that Atlantic article means several different things depending on whether you’ve been called out for saying it’s about things it’s not. For example, it’s not at all about how the 90% despises the left-leaning side of the lowest of the gilded class because their insincere, while despising the right-leaners less because they’re honest. It never discusses anything at all about this. It discusses class resentment based on inequality, and its major point is not that the gilded class is trying to delude the proles, but rather that they’re deluding themselves.

Your point has seemed to be through this whole thread that insincerity is the linchpin of resentment. As evidence, I offer you your latest comment, like the ones before it, wherein you do at long last make an admirable effort to actually cast scorn on the right-leaning gilty, even if you turn that scorn into a backhanded insult that approvingly points to their sincerity.

But even if we ignore your veiled compliment, your claim that the condescending rich right don’t claim to be looking out for the little guy is very hard to credit. Go back and look over right-wing rhetoric surrounding tax cut debates. Go back and look at right-wing rhetoric surrounding healthcare reform. It may be phrased as “we’re gonna help you help yourself”, but they’re dishonestly reassuring the(ir) proles that they’re on their team just as much as the sneering liberal elites you despise.

BLUF, the Atlantic article calls out the right and left of the 9.9% as self-deluding, condescending scolds who preach meritocracy while undermining it at every turn. It’s not a screed about the special failings of the rich left. The jus’folks compassionate conservative rich right and the humane cosmopolitan liberal rich “left” both tell their would-be thralls that they’re helping them, the deserving poor and working class, in a way that comports to their individual values. And then they both help themselves., and inequality and resentment grows.

Finally, at long last… Stop trying to make “Versailles liberal” happen. It’s not going to happen.

Dipper @191: We’re making incremental progress. Thanks for stating so clearly that those EU migrants are, for you, outside of the communal “we”. Unfortunately your next two moves are a) a fallacy and b) an unkindness.

a) Does it have a name? Maximalist fallacy maybe. It goes like this: Because I cannot solve all problems, I don’t have to solve any problems. Because I can’t save everyone, I have no ethical obligation to save anyone. (1) I don’t subscribe to this. I think that we can, and maybe should, take the time to think about where the limits are of what we can do, but then do however much is realistically achievable.
b) So your disagreement with me is a difference of opinion, but my disagreement with you is “demonstrating my alleged superiority”? How is this little put-down enabling the productive discussion that, as per your subsequent questions, you pretend to desire?

What you’ve arrived at is smack-bang my operational definition of xenophobia: If members of my community(2) because they are marked as foreign(3) are excluded from the “we”, this is the very essence of xenophobia(4). Maybe this clarifies why I used the term regarding your writing: it hits the definition right on the nose.

You’re asking, in a hostile way and at comment 200+ of a thread that is likely to be closed off any moment, what I really think of immigration. Sorry, that’s just too big a question for this space. Not just because it would go way beyond the scope of this conversation, but also because I believe — and many here undoubtedly don’t — that we sometimes run up against conflicting ethical imperatives. I the case at hand, to be extremely sketchy, no, I don’t think that ultimately, pushed all the way down the argument, we have a good reason to ever exclude anyone from the community of “us” BUT at the same time we ALSO have an obligation to respect the self-determination of other people, and these two are in conflict. We simply have no world-wide governance system that would bring us even close to acting in a community with a random person in a far-flung place without committing incidental injustice.(5)

So, no, I can’t write down here my Grand Unifying Theory of global migration. What I can write about are my own guiding principles and minimum criteria. What would I do with the settled foreigners? Make it easier for them to have a good, lawful life here, according to their needs. Doing this would increase the incentives to help other countries to make live just as livable there as it is here. For example, supporting democracy and human rights, rather than corrupt dictatorships that give companies from my country favorable business conditions. Would I ever deport anyone? Pretty much no in general, though exceptions are easy to construct.(6)

(1) There is a story that has become a cliché among people who work on problems that are just so ubiquitous and overwhelmingly recurrent that they can’t be driven by hope eradicating them. It’s the story of the boy on a beach of stranded starfish. https://starfishproject.com/the-parable/ It’s not 100% germane to our discussion, but I was reminded of it.
(2) For simplicity’s sake, say people who legitimately conduct their regular lives there – live, work (if applicable), go to school (if applicable), partake in community activities, buy their food on the market or at the stores… just regular inhabitants. There will be disagreements about what “legitimate” means, but a rock-bottom minimum definition would be anyone who arrived by legal means, certainly including EU migrants under freedom of movement. My own definition is a lot larger, but for the sake of the argument, let’s stick to what’s least controversial: people who have simply availed themselves by what they have been told is their right.
(3) In any event, people lacking local citizenship status. In most cases, their children. In later generations, the degree to which a mark applies will depend on whether their physical traits, names, clothing customs, religions etc. differ from the prototypical autochthonous person.
(4) If the reasons are racial rather than national (there’s an overlap of course), or related to gender or sexual orientation, it would be racism, sexism and homophobia, respectively.
(5) I have the feeling that the weakness of international institutions, of anything resembling global governance will be remarked upon in future history books along with the inability of advanced rich Western democracies to make democratic choices based on long-term goals. Well, I hope we’ll still have history books.
(6) Like, I’d hand Anders Breivik, had he committed his massacre in my country, back to Sweden, knowing that his chances of receiving justice would, if anything, be better. But someone like him can be in someone else’s problem field, if that “someone else” has a good human rights record, won’t execute him etc.

It’s ”Brexit” Baby!

The Topic of this thread is ”Brexit” – and how a Baby in diapers made it very difficult for one of the ”babysitters” trying to plan to ”exit” in some kind of… organized… can we call it ”organized” manner – and I have come to the conclusion – that ”they” whoever these ”they” are – are never-ever will be able to execute the however planned ”exit” – as in reality it is as impossible as a Baby walking next to a Queen in any type of an organized manner -(if the Baby doesn’t have some help from some Russian Babysitters) –

AND that’s what it is! –
On this weekend – on a wonderful sunny saturday on the world famous Lake of Constance – bordering at the same time 4 -(in words: four) countries – in an area – where quite naturally – since generations – 3 to 4 languages have been spoken and about everything – dudes like Dipper – or ph are worried ”mixes” quite pleasantly.

And about these ”Russians” -(they also absolutely love this area – they were just joking – Right? – joyfully messing a bit with some Anglo-Saxon minds – which is my Italian boyfriends favorite hobby too – because WE – the American Anglo-Saxons – never ever will understand that one just doesn’t enter a church in flip-flops – while in the UK you have to wear a tie)

Capisce?

Hidari

Just your regular reminder that the odds of Trump being impeached are close to zero, and the odds of him actually being removed from office, i.e. armed guards smashing down the door of the White House and dragging the President off to jail (something which has literally never happened in the history of the Republic) are absolutely and precisely zero.

‘Being removed from office’ and ‘being dragged off to jail by armed guards who have smashed down your door’ are not synonymous. There are plenty of examples of people who have been removed from office without armed guards smashing down their doors and dragging them off to jail (including in the US; and including Presidents; no Presidents of the US, it’s true, although it seems clear to me that the prospect of being removed from office appeared so certain to Nixon that he resigned to avoid it).

‘Note also the indictment includes hacking voting machines, which means Trump didn’t win the election.’

Except for the trivial fact that he did, your point is unarguable.

One thing that is really important to understand (and I know it seems extraordinary and unbelievable right now, but I’m right) is that in 30/40 years time no one is going to remember any of this. Trump (assuming he wins a second Presidential election) will become sanctified by the liberal elite, and the NYT will be writing anxious op-eds about ‘Why can’t President Kim Kardashian obey the norms and values of her predecessors, like the fondly remembered Presidential reign of President Donald Trump?’. And if you speak to your friends about the Russiagate stuff, they will look blank for a few seconds, search their memories and then go ‘oh yeah? Wasn’t Trump accused of…I forget the details…something about Russia?’ And then you both will try and remember what it was all about, get most of it wrong, and then order another beer.

This Russiagate stuff (even if half of it is true, which seems unlikely) is going nowhere. Trump will not be impeached. He will not be removed from office. The results of the election will not be overturned (I don’t even know how that could happen).

The only conceivable way I could be wrong would be if the Democrats got their act together, put forward a positive message, won back the Congress and Senate, and then, on the basis of a really strong positive message of social democracy, put forward a young radical politician (preferably a woman, better still a woman and POC) who would win the next Presidential election.

But they almost certainly won’t do that, and one of the major reasons why is that they are obsessing about Russiagate, a ‘scandal’ that no one, in their heart of hearts, really gives a shit about.

@ Collin Street oh you again. As I explained, I got my numbers off the ONS website, and they are what I state them to be. And I see no numbers from you, because there never are in answer to that question.

@ Chris (merian) W. And no numbers from you either, because there never are in answer to that question.

Principles are all very nice, but round here we are living in a world of numbers. Numbers of houses, numbers of people in schools, numbers of people in front of you in a queue. And we are quite used to the different countries of origin of all those folks, and from what I’ve seen everyone seems to get along fine. As I wrote, Harlow is a fine town. Why would all the recent arrivals all be so keen to bring their friends and relatives over if they were receiving the kind of abuse you allege?

I think despite all the moaning above that I’m entitled to point out that bringing in enormous numbers of people to do minimum wage jobs doesn’t seem like a route designed to deliver prosperity for all, or even pay for itself, and once you’ve done this and everyone has made their homes here, there is literally no going back. In contrast to the cliff edge,this is a steady slide into a world of “how the hell did we get here?”. So given this is a policy you cannot undo, I think it would be good to stop it before it goes any further and we are sure we know where this is going. Hence the Brexit vote to make sure we have elected politicians we can make accountable for immigration policy.

TM @ 184

“But if you embrace the claim that things were better then, you *are* making a comparison between now and then. And what many comments here show is that those who take that perspective really have no clue and also aren’t really interested in the the actualyl lived experience of the time. It’s really just a leftist version of a golden age myth.”

I’ve never made the argument that we should ‘go back to 1960’. I was countering your assertion that history is a package deal where if we want more security and control over our lives, we have to accept some kind of proto-fascism. The fact is that it is possible to rectify wrongs and agitate for improvement without having to accept some kind of unstoppable ‘wave of progress’ that destroys as much as it creates.

Hidaris solution when faced with treasonous fascists: ignore it and pretend they’re normal.

You’re either stupid or shameful.

@Hidari, 216:

In forty years the average person will be too preoccupied with surviving their day-to-day life, possibly complicated by the consequences of global warming, to care much about what happened forty years ago. The average person today cares little about what happened in 1978, after all.

Political historians, however, will regard Trump’s illegitimate installation and the issues that allowed it–politicization of the NY FBI office, Russian intervention, Republican voter suppression, and population changes between the states stripping the majority of democratic representation–as the beginning of the end for American democracy.

American democracy is ultimately doomed but there is nothing improper about pointing out that the wheels are beginning to fracture.

You all know that an indictment is not proof of guilt right? Especially an indictment that relies upon secret evidence. I realize (heavy sarcasm) that the FBI have never indicted anyone on weak evidence, particularly in a natsec/terrorism case, so this is just refusing to accept the evidence. Fortunately we’ll never know if the secret evidence is any good, because the case is never going to go to trial. So this is all theater. Don’t forget to tip the usher on the way out.

The last indictment is not going particularly well, for those interested in such things. And is typical of Justice Department/FBI terrorism/natsec cases, they’re trying to make some pretty aggressive demands about keeping evidence secret (including effectively secret from the defense team).

It would be nice to know what, if anything, is supporting the claims about voting machines. While US voting machines are garbage and completely insecure, hacking them remotely and en masse would be pretty difficult. They’re not necessarily on public networks, or in ways that make them easy to find remotely (easier if you’re local obviously). Also there are loads of different types, configuration etc that you would have to hit – making a mass hack pretty much impossible (or at least improbably labour intensive).

That’s not to say that voting machines weren’t hacked. I’m sure they were. But they would have been hacked by local machines/parties – just as in the past ballot boxes were stuffed by locals.

“An indictment is an allegation, not an objective fact.”

You can say the same about a conviction. It’s a judgement, not an objective fact. Plenty of innocent people have been convicted, often after giving full confessions. A number of people have been convicted by Mueller already, and it’s open to you to claim that these convictions weren’t reliable, and that the same will be true of future convictions.

If your prior beliefs are strong enough, no evidence can change them as we see from climate change, evolution and just about every belief held by Trump supporters.

So, is there any evidence that would lead you to change your views on this, or are you just engaged in derp?

@208: Really, Quiggin? You’re going to “derp” Cian, who IMHO is one of the most sensible commenters on these threads? I don’t know about other country’s legal procedures, but in the U.S. it’s proverbial that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. An indictment that will never be tried., (because it’s doubtful that anyone indicted would accept an all-expenses-paid offer of a trip to Las Vegas), based on top secret testimony from the oh-so-reliable intelligence apparatus should induce such certainty as to transform anyone’s priors? Stephen Cohen, based on long experience of U.S./Soviet(er Russian) relations already predicted that such a manoeuver would be forthcoming beforehand. And the idea that there are only two sides of the issue, pro-Trump/Putin or Pro-Dembot/anti-Putin. is a propagandistic absurdity, since it’s little likely that any Russian efforts swung the election toward Trump rather than a host of other factors. The fact is that Trump didn’t win the election but HRC and her cohorts lost the election and the Putin meme is just a means of throwing shade so as to deny responsibility for their own failure, while still attempting to cling to power within their party apparatus. Back in 2008, I thought that liberals, though I disagreed with them, were rational interlocutors. Since 2016, as amply evident on these threads, it’s clear that they are deliriously delusional and need to be “derped”.

@jch (and many others) Hillary lost by (around) 50 000 votes in a small number of states. So, other things being equal, any factor that cost her more than 50 000 votes in those states cost her the election.

For example, in my opinion, her selection of Tim Kaine rather than an established critic of the TPP and NAFTA was such a factor. So was her reliance on attacking Trump’s character in the expectation that “decent Republicans” would turn against him. So was Comey’s last minute statement about the emails. So were the leaks of information hacked from the DNC. So was her “born to rule” manner. The fact that any particular one of these factors lost her enough votes to make the difference does not invalidate the claim that another of these factors did the same.

Nah, Clinton lost Ohio and Florida, two large and important states that Obama had won twice. This dwarfs those three smaller upper midwestern states in consequence because with this disadvantage they, and Pennsylvania, become critical.

Clinton lost big and badly.

AND the Topic of this thread is STILL ”Brexit”! –
and I still have no idea who this ”Hillary” person is – and if an average American can’t find Britain or Europe on a map I (ME) have the right NOT to know who this Hillary person is and why some old dudes on a Blog called ”Crooked Timber” -(remember KANT!) are talking about this Hillary person as if they are exchanging their war-remembrances…?

SOOO!
the Topic is BREXIT and how often do you stubborn guys have to be told?
– and as I read this morning in a European sunday paper that my Euros -(or Dollars) are now even 15 percent more worth – if I spend them in Britain – and that I can get a whole house somewhere on the British countryside for a complete bargain -(about 40 to 50 percent cheaper than in CA) – BUT on the other hand in Egypt my money would be worth NOW about 100 percent more – BUT as I once spend 3 month in Egypt -(teaching not only Brits ”culture”) I definitely will go for the British Countryside – and so IF FF von Clownstick and all these crazy Dippers will be even more successful in destroying Great Britain – I will do my part to built it UP again by buying UP Great Britain for… how is it called? – for… ”peanuts” – and just think about it – if it soon will be cheaper to live in Great Britain than in… for example Spain?

All these Brits who are now in Spain will have to come back to ”their homeland”!

GOD -(but NOT Trump) Save the Queen!
-(or ”Quennie” how my British friends call her)

And about these Russians – do you guys know – that them Russians truly think – that American Minds are the best to toy with?
It’s really like Jimmy Kimmel sending out somebody on Hollywood Blvd and asking the people who Vladimir Putin is?

”Vladimir Putin”? –
”Putn”??!
Isn’t that these Baby-naked Angels one finds in… church?

‘ If you find their choice of topics uninteresting, or trivial, the obvious solution is to stop reading.’

My comment above was grossly off-topic (which is why I’m now going to stop posting and go out and enjoy the sunshine, pausing only briefly to reflect that this is the beginning of a complex process that will probably result in the end of our technological civilisation) but then so was yours so, ‘chutzpah’ I believe is the word.

Hidari

You’re right, I didn’t get your point. Thank you for the clarification. If people are going to fantasise about Trump being impeached and removed from office for collusion with Russia to rig the election, then they might just as well (or even better) fantasise about his standing trial before the ICC: I agree with that. If you’re going to dream, why not dream big? Good point.

Hidari: “It’s worthwhile stopping for a second and asking ourselves what this would be.”

Why bother, given that I have granted the point, in the actual text you quoted from me? (“It may well be going nowhere, for reason which have little to do with whether it is true…”)

If you mean to say that you think that Trump won’t suffer legal consequences as a result of the investigation, then say that, and you won’t get much argument from me. But what you’ve actually said that I object to is this: “…even if half of it is true, which seems unlikely…”

Again, I pointed to that exact thing, which you quoted. (“…the repetition that it isn’t true in the face of the systematic demonstration that many of the elements of the story _are_ true isn’t really a rational act…”)

Yes in your entire response, you don’t address that. I wonder why not?

Oh, well, Dipper – you ask an impossible question and then of course you’re disdainful when I don’t answer it. Quick, tell me, how many secondary school places should there be in Wales? How many university places in courses that lead to a qualification in graphic design? How many angels should be accommodated on the tip of a needle? (TBH, I don’t even know how many inhabitants your disunited kingdom has at the moment, and I don’t care.)

Here’s another guideline: If the number of people who want to use a service, live in a place, recreate in an area, send their children to a school, be treated by a dentist etc etc. is so great that straightforward short to medium term policy measures cannot resolve in a way that is generally accepted as equitable and protective of people’s rights (to an education, to medical care, to an intact environment…), THEN you can start waving the flag and asking for intervention on a higher policy level. But according to you that isn’t the case. Life isn’t a hellscape in your town, despite the atrocious 21% of people born with non-British citizenship. You accept yourself that the main need is another hospital. Also, it seems (and we’ve had this very same discussion before, right here) some laws preventing exploitation of hourly workers, protecting employment, raising the minimum wage, and if I remember correction, outlawing the practices of slum landlords. My view is that it is the inability of central government of getting these things implemented, of wresting some of the fruits of labour from the owners of the capital for the benefit of reversing the more and more unequal society. Your response is: let’s exempt our government from obeying international agreements they have previously entered to reduce the number of immigrants. What a short-sighted view! Don’t you think that instead of exploiting Polish families they’ll just go back to exploiting English ones, to the extent they’ve ever stopped? It’s not a zero-sum situation — except if your policies slide down a rabbit hole of neoliberal employee-coddling, it is completely clear that yes, these immigrants will easily pay for themselves. Instead of the disgraceful spectacle that your government is currently presenting to he world you could have debates about how many more training places in nursing and plumbing and accounting should be opened (sometimes with EU money, as I understand, in Cornwall for example).