Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
And Teresa May thinks the EU is ace, so what's your point?

The point is that you can draw lines of comparison on certain issues between politicians who are notionally at very different points on the political compass. Your own personal Overton window might be calibrated in such a way that the Labour party of 1997-2010 was "hard right", but I don't think that's a meaningful use of the phrase. By the same token, some people think the present Tory party are a bunch of squishy liberals hopelessly in thrall to political correctness.

And this is all totally irrelevant when you consider that thinking Tony Blair is the second coming of Christ and that invading Iraq was a jolly good idea are not actually prerequisites to criticising people who share neo-Nazi memes or threaten Jewish MPs under the pretence of 'solidarity with Palestine'.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'll accept that I'm wrong if someone can come up with a good argument why anyone criticising anti-Semitism from within Labour (so don't waste your time replying about Tory hypocrites) must necessarily be a "Blairite" or "right-wing", let alone "hard right".

I mean, perhaps I'm being naive here, but I always thought anti-racism was generally a feature of the left rather than the right?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
why are you engaging with a policeman whos only intention is to derail, frustrate and obfuscate?

It's a relay event for charity. After John, Benny B is on the third leg and then a secret guest participant is going to bring it home.

Tea's being a really good sport here. He doesn't believe any of the incomprehensible stuff he's saying, but he's gamely refusing to answer even the simplest question directly and denying basic reality for the good of the children (like a one-man Wu-Tang Clan from Exeter).
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Well this just demonstrates the total inadequacy of a single axis for categorising political parties, doesn't it? I agree Labour under Blair and Brown was neoliberal but we're talking about a social issue here, so it makes more sense to concentrate on the social rather than economic axis. And on that front, in terms that are directly relevant to a discussion of culture, religion, race and racism, Labour is not and has never been "hard right".

jesus, economic decisions have profound social consequences ffs, in the sense of fucking up people's lives (liberalism is all fine and dandy but it doesn't mean an awful lot if you're not well off, if it comes along with rightwing economic thinking). If you want it in simple terms, a significant proportion of the parliamentary Labour Party - call them Blairites or call them whatever you like, the name doesn't make a difference - believe in neoliberal ideas which have and will continue to increase social inequality in a devastating way, and which are racist by their nature because in the real world they disproportionately affect people from ethnic minorities.

The 'hard right' of the LP therefore has an obvious meaning - those people who are most wedded to those ideas. When it comes down to the big decisions that will destroy lives - which are largely economic decisions, whichever way you cut it, they are in the same camp as the Tories.

No-one has ever said that criticising anti-Semitism from within Labour makes anyone a Blairite - as I've said repeatedly, some of the criticisms are quite valid, and I don't think Corbyn has dealt with them well enough. Some of the allegations have been bullshit, and most have dealt with incredibly peripheral figures or Facebook posts (as opposed to what ministers/MPs have said/done or ACTUAL POLICY). The circumstantial allegations around Corbyn himself have been pure baseless targeting. Livingstone is a dickhead, invested in his own ego more than offending others.

And yes, OF COURSE the (intentional) lack of media focus upon Tory racism is relevant here - ffs, stop pretending that this is happening in a vacuum outside politics! As I've shown previously, the media and the public doesn't give a shit about anti-Semitism (or any other racism) when it would go against its broader political interests.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Neoliberalism isn't "racist", the whole point is that it treats everyone the same. That may in practice exacerbate existing inequality but it didn't create that inequality in the first place.

No-one has ever said that criticising anti-Semitism from within Labour makes anyone a Blairite...

Horseshit. This is absolutely the standard response. If you like I could make a collection of FB/Twitter screencaps showing exactly this.

And you're *still* concentrating on the "But the Tories.../But the media..." angle when I'm specifically talking about criticism from *within* Labour and wider left, I see.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Neoliberalism treating everyone the same reminds me of that Anatole France quote:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, to steal their bread”.

But even that isn’t true. There are no borders for the rich, they can travel and work wherever they like whilst the poorest (and let’s face it, blackest) have to hang off the bottom of lorries or risk drowning in the med.

There are amazing safety nets for the rich - peaking in the upwards wealth redistribution of bank bailouts. Actual state socialism. And who is it that is disproportionally affected by the resulting austerity, even now?


Also it’s important to remember that Neoliberalism is a form of capitalism - a restructuring of capitalism as a result of its failure to increase the inequality it seeks to maintain.

So saying neoliberalism didn’t cause the underlying inequality is like saying that the last cigarette you smoked didn’t give you cancer.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Neoliberalism isn't "racist", the whole point is that it treats everyone the same. That may in practice exacerbate existing inequality but it didn't create that inequality in the first place.

Horseshit. This is absolutely the standard response. If you like I could make a collection of FB/Twitter screencaps showing exactly this.

And you're *still* concentrating on the "But the Tories.../But the media..." angle when I'm specifically talking about criticism from *within* Labour and wider left, I see.

(i) Obviously it doesn't treat everyone the same - we're talking about reality here, Tea, as a reminder, not textbooks. (ii) If a set of policies leads to widening racial inequality, it is de facto racist. No need to use inverted commas, it's an actual thing. "Race" is the thing that's imagined.

How will that prove that I or anyone on Dissensus has said this absurd thing? This was what you said: 'I'll accept that I'm wrong if someone can come up with a good argument why anyone criticising anti-Semitism from within Labour (so don't waste your time replying about Tory hypocrites) must necessarily be a "Blairite" or "right-wing", let alone "hard right". ' and I replied that no-one here is making that argument, because they aren't. You're just changing the goalposts endlessly. You spend half the time deflecting onto why there can't be a hard right of Labour, a different point which is nonetheless ridiculous enough to necessitate response.

You don't seem to be able to hold the complexity of reality at one go. It can be simultaneously true that some of the allegations of anti-Semitism have sound basis, that some do not, that some people are making the accusations in good faith, and that some most certainly are not (and that of course sometimes the motivations are mixed). That Corbyn hasn't dealt with allegations against others well, but that the personal allegations against him are ludicrous. And that there is an interaction between the accusations made in bad faith, and those made in good faith, and the traction that results from a critical mass of people declaring Labour or Corbyn or Corbyn's side of Labour or some people within the Labour fold who we've never heard of (there's never any real clarity on which it is, of course, or what is really at stake here - that's the witch-hunt part of it, the preoccupation by many, though of course not all, with a slur rather than an actual rooting out of racism), and the massive part that the media has to play in deciding which racial slurs are bad, and which we can just conveniently ignore and gloss over. Which is the real history of racism.
And of course not forgetting the history of the Right uniting with the right of the Labour Party to unseat Corbyn - no conspiracy theory, it's not that organised, but rather opportunistic. It's been happening since 2015 - a steady stream of lies and half-truths. Of course this has relevance here. All of these things do.

Reply to last point: you seem to have conveniently forgotten what we were talking about! No, we were talking about the scandal as a whole, how it is come about and why it is disingenuous to pretend that it is all about anti-racism. As I've said now about a million times. You can't pick half a story to study and pretend it is the whole story, alleging that anyone who is interested in the whole story is just deflecting. Well you can, but again it's an aversion to the complexity of reality, designed simply to win an argument. And failing even there.
 
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firefinga

Well-known member
Neoliberalism isn't "racist", the whole point is that it treats everyone the same.

That's the big claim of neoliberalism. It's their "sales pitch": everyone has the same chance of success, and that's guaranteed by law. And the salemsmen of neoliberalism always will find some "from rags to riches" to supposedly support these claims. But, as evidence has shown, the neoliberal regime in (more or less) all the western countries has deeply widened income inequality and the speed of this happening. The poor got poorer, the middle class is slowly crumbling, the rich are getting richer quicker. It's a pyramid sheme.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Did everyone miss the bit where I said it can exacerbate existing inequalities? Including, obviously, racial ones, given the big correlations between race, wealth/class, education and opportunity? 'Treating everyone the same' is obviously not going to lead to everyone being the same, and is likely to make inequality worse in fact, when there is so much inequality to start with. I still think it's a stretch to say this is racist, as such. The racial inequalities were there already, hundreds of years ago.

Not quite sure what all this has to do with labour + antisemitism.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This was what you said: 'I'll accept that I'm wrong if someone can come up with a good argument why anyone criticising anti-Semitism from within Labour (so don't waste your time replying about Tory hypocrites) must necessarily be a "Blairite" or "right-wing", let alone "hard right". ' and I replied that no-one here is making that argument, because they aren't.

Well I don't think I said anyone here was doing that, did I? It is nonetheless a very well-worn trope that I've seen plenty of times elsewhere on the internet.
 

vimothy

yurp
neoliberalism legitimises economic inequality with antiracism, multiculturalism, corporate sponsorship of gay pride events.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Did everyone miss the bit where I said it can exacerbate existing inequalities? Including, obviously, racial ones, given the big correlations between race, wealth/class, education and opportunity? 'Treating everyone the same' is obviously not going to lead to everyone being the same, and is likely to make inequality worse in fact, when there is so much inequality to start with. I still think it's a stretch to say this is racist, as such. The racial inequalities were there already, hundreds of years ago.

Not quite sure what all this has to do with labour + antisemitism.

That is gold. You introduced neoliberalism into the bloody conversation by the bizarre contention that there couldn't be a 'hard right' of the Labour Party, for god's sakes!
 
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