Off Topic Politics Thread

Ironically, I'm guessing that Os saw that tweet because it got amplified by Elon Musk, who owns a global communications platform and uses it to play footsies with white supremacists. But him using Twitter in that fashion is completely apolitical, I'm sure.

 

Straight talking is her bullshit, multiple lies and misinformation well recorded as many have pointed out.

 

And on the other hand are people not allowed political views? Can you only be chief of AI for Google if you are neutral?

 

People said they liked Trump in 2016 because of his straight talking.....

The thing that makes me laugh is that I am right leaning as I have said here so many times, but the current lot really make it difficult for me to actually believe I am anymore.

 

That's because you are small-c conservative, in the traditional sense. The current lot are reactionaries. There are a lot of differences, but one of the primary has always been that 20-21st century conservatives tend to have a lot of respect for the traditional institutions of democracy, and reactionaries tend to prefer looking wistfully back to authoritarianism. Mostly authoritarianism with them atop the pile, shockingly enough.

It's funny to hear how 'woke' the tech sphere is, because an awful lot of them are pretty openly reactionary: Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, a bunch of others. Curtis Yarvin, who coined the term "Dark Enlightenment" about the neo-reactionary movement (favourably!) and is probably its foremost thinker, if you can call him that, was a regular feature in their online hangouts:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/coinbase-silicon-valley-libertarian/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/marc-andreessen-manifesto-techno-optimism.html

 

Everyone has a right to a view. That is a view shared by the right and the left. We should all have the right to say things which will not lead to actual harms being committed on a person. So why is there such a desperate attempt to smash the word "woke"?

The right has always been built on laissez-faire and rugged individualism. For me, this is just the politics of bullying. You will only be as successful as you can manage without external help. So if you are born rich, born white, born in a good area, born physically strong, born male, born attractive, born lucky you will have nothing to stop you being as damn successful as you damn well please.

The word "woke" is terrifying to this group of people. It sounds like those people who are not in this category - who are the vast majority of people globally although somehow we label them minorities - have woken up to how unfair this is. Anything that balances up the world put the hegemony at risk. The balance of power is in danger.

Except it isn't. The world is increasingly locked in its cycle of moving money from the weak to the strong. Wealth imbalance is worse than ever. The true conspiracy is that we are all kept too busy arguing about who gets to call their genitals a penis to rise up and strip these arseholes of their wealth. They only have it because we let them.

Let's keep arguing against social mobility - by tying it to ludicrous non-issues like "what is a woman". Let's ignore the majority of people are not given a fair shot by focusing on "hardline feminists". Let's just keep distracting people from the horrible mess of the world by throwing in "outrage" and creating "moral panics".

If there is anyone who is gullible in the world, it is the people who use the word "woke" with genuine hostility. The whole thing was invented to keep you in your little cave of ignorance, throwing **** at the walls of your own home.

 

The currently lots are “right leaning” though. So you probably still are. They’ve just gone further. Hell there are people out there that try to say Starmer is too “right leaning” - such is the shift with the current party that was supposed to be right leaning. It also explains the polling as well.

 

Many people also saw through his lies, misinformation and populist bullshit given Clinton got more individual votes. This may be of interest to those not familiar with the US system. https://theconversation.com/curious...-won-if-hillary-clinton-got-more-votes-126658

I copied and pasted the image from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-epoch-times/ I'm probably to the left of least biased but prefer to shape my opinions depending on the issues being discussed and have no party political affiliations. I'm a long time supporter of electoral reform and tactical voting and despise the current incumbents.

please log in to view this image

 

You think crying at a voting booth is normal behaviour?

 

Rugged individualism and creating a society full of responsible, hard-working and well-intentioned people is what has given liberal lefties such a solid and safe society so they can spew their insane ideas.

Without the self-reliant, hard working individuals that create companies and businesses and laws, these woke morons wouldn’t have anything in the first place.

Worth remembering as you type that from your iPhone, that capitalism is what allowed thousands of individuals around the globe to co-ordinate and create such an amazing product.

The word woke doesn’t terrify me. It annoys me.

Much like liberal lefty’s that sit atop the ivory tower that capitalism has built for them and ignore everything it took to get to that point.

We live in an age where there is more opportunity than in history and instead of going out and making a decent life for themselves, they sit and cry about how unfair daddy government is.

Improving society starts with looking in the mirror.

 

You spend an awful lot time on here crying about how unfair daddy government is. Are you secretly a lefty?

 

You act as if the current period of capitalistic excess is in some way the creator of the world's wealth. It isn't. In fact, you yourself have ranted often about the creation and debasement of wealth by governments. Wealth is an illusion. Or in fact a shared delusion. This person who does very little but owns much deserves to swap his accumulated tokens of wealth for everything. This other person who works hard and own nothing deserves to swap his accumulated tokens of wealth for rent in a rundown shared house with 8 similar people. And he should be thankful for it.

Before this glorious age of capitalistic excess this poor bastard would have lived in a small shack in a village working the field. Yet, he did know what his time was worth. He did know where his labour went. He did see a direct correlation between his wealth and what he did. If you go back far enough, before we tied the lies of wealth into the actuality of wealth, before the strong tied the theology of inherited power into their position in society, almost all of society was agrarian and almost everyone was equal.

The deification of the rich was an essential part of growth beyond tribal cultures and into modern cities and nations and corporations. I am not going to argue that all progress is bad - but the process of attaining progress has relied upon the unleveling of society. If we have now got better technology, better access to food, better lifestyles, then why do we need to continue this lie that wealth is earned? It was a lie when the barons imposed levies on their fiefdoms and it is still a lie today. God didn't give you that wealth. Mummy and Daddy didn't give you that wealth. History gave you that wealth - and history is a bitch.

What percentage of people escape poverty through endeavour? We now live in a society where 20-24% of people in the UK - one of the great syphons of the world's wealth - now lives in internationally recognised standards of poverty. That isn't progress. That isn't the great reward for laissez fair politics. That is the ongoing abuse of the poor at the hands of the rich. Throw them a ****ing iphone and watch them be quiet. In India almost everyone has a ****ing mobile phone but barely anyone has access to sanitation - like toilets.

Laissez faire politics is the mindset of those who have. But it is also the mindset of those who are foolish enough to believe that those who have really want you to join them. They don't.

 

Good question unlike to get a meaningful answer.

 

And it also isn't as if this current form of predatory capitalism is the way things have always been, either. My grandparents worked boring middle-class jobs: my grandfather sold cars and later managed a hardware store, his wife worked for the telephone company. That was sufficient for them to own a house mortgage-free, have a lakeside cottage, an RV, a winter place in Florida, take regular vacations internationally, and buy more unnecessary consumer gadgets than any 50 people could ever possibly need. All while amassing more in savings than they could ever spend. Today, those boring middle class jobs do not afford the same opportunities; you'd be lucky to afford a mortgage on a shoebox, and forget about all the rest.

Did this happen because people don't work hard anymore? Certainly not, productivity is at an all-time high. What happened is that labour (small l) had serious bargaining power for a couple decade post-war, which allowed the middle class to make significant gains in standard of living. And then thereafter, the ownership class* -- buoyed by favourable-to-them economic conditions -- mounted a very successful campaign to both reverse those gains and demonize the very idea that labour should be well-compensated. Rather than demand to be paid fairly for their work, labour should instead dream about the day they become ultra-rich themselves.

So now we have this stupefying cult of the ultra-rich, where it's not merely enough that we don't eat them (blubber in a ketamine marinade doesn't sound tasty, so I can't imagine people lining up to eat Elon anyway), but we're expected to treat them as ubermenchen, and any mention that perhaps it's unseemly that they have all the money is Attacking Capitalism. We lionize sociopathic behaviour...Andrew Tate is an icon among young men for telling them that, if they exploit the people around them as he does, they too can be wealthy (while he exploits those young men). It's all a bit grotesque.

*I'm hardly the first to say this, but the old divisions of lower/middle/upper class are extinct. There are two classes in the modern era: the people who own all the ****, and the people who do not. Increasingly, the people who own all the **** do not really make much of anything; they simply engage in rent-seeking behaviour, leveraging their wealth to create more wealth without contributing a damned thing. And everyone else, including well-compensated professionals, suffer for it.

 

I've been looking for an English version of wappie. In the Netherlands it describes a fool who is lost in their delusions, a weirdo, crackpot, a conspiracy theorist.

 

Fair analysis, I want to pick up the thread of the chasms opening up that you mention.

A huge chasm has opened up between the wealthy and the super wealthy.

You can have a household income in London of £150k and not be anywhere near owning a one bedroom flat whilst struggling to pay £120 a day nursery costs per child. That’s the reality of people on £50-£100k salaries in London or the Home Counties. Then those earning £100-120k take home less than those on £99.5k, if they have 2 kids because of outdated child benefit caps.

Simply saying “oh poor you, be better at saving” isn’t helpful.

I think Yousef’s supposed wealth tax in Scotland simply targets the aspirational and is entirely the wrong strategy. They should be finding creative ways of taxing the super rich, particularly while they’ve been raking in money during the high interest, high stock performance year we’ve had.

 

I have friends who are both professionals. She is the senior paralegal at a large law firm; he is in a management position in IT with a major defense contractor. They have no kids, no major expenses. That's good enough to have a mortgage on a mediocre duplex in an out-of-the-way suburb, and two 10+ year old cars. Fifty years ago they'd own half the damned county. But today, 30% of all housing bought in the province is bought by investors, so it's becoming increasingly impossible for anyone else to own anything, never mind anything nice.

 

Childcare costs on top of that would probably turn that duplex into a small 2 bed!

 

And you wouldn't even be able to feed that kid the premium catfood.

 

Ours make do on gruel