Jacob Rees-Mogg

Woebot

Well-known member
it seems a bit too convenient if the way influence works is that my ideological opponents are being manipulated and taken advantage of, whereas I am free from influence.

yes.

and that conception happens on all sides. i suppose that's what the alt-right media have furiously been trying to establish - that supposedly no-one is immune to media influence (even if that seems to me like the sort of thing people with massive emotional investment in the media data-stream believe - plenty of people aren't THAT interested)

the left argue they're the eternal losers. and the stats today [generally] support the idea of the top echelons of society having an *unseemly* disproportionate amount of resources. difficult, pointless even, to argue with that in 2018...

but there are always cross-currents between big state (by which i meant authority) and little state (by which i meant self-determination). no working government is able to be one or the other - even the USA where, truthfully, democrats are closer to tories.

etcetera ad infinitum.
 

luka

Well-known member
the left argue they're the eternal losers

in theory the whole point of the left is to fight for the losers, the oppressed and the exploited.
to use weight of numbers to push back against wealth, power and influence lol
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Even I didnt realise it was quite so bad.

the role of private pensions apparently brings the UK up to an average level, making this basically a massive 'optional' tax - pay up or live in aged poverty.

I'd never really thought about the fact that private pensions aren't such a central consideration in many countries. Presumably in Ireland they still are, given that it doesn't shine in that league table either?
 
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luka

Well-known member
you exist within your own thick gaseous cloud comprised solely of unfounded assumption. i breathe the pure air of objectivity. once you've taken enough acids that's what happens.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
in theory the whole point of the left is to fight for the losers, the oppressed and the exploited.

Is this why there's never been a successful, widespread socialist movement in the USA? Of all countries, people there hate to think of themselves as 'losers'.

I'm reminded of the quote about how "poor Americans never think of themselves as poor - just temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Is this why there's never been a successful, widespread socialist movement in the USA?
depends on one's definitions of widespread and successful but late 19th century thru til inter-WW period had quite strong leftist presence, Debs, IWW, etc

but yeah it's one of the reasons. related to/part of the constellation of rugged individualism, bootstraps and so on.

class has always been much, much less conscious here than UK. everyone who's not abjectly poor or staggeringly wealthy is middle-class.

many decades of gutting organized labor ain't helping, ofc.

remains to be seen how much juice current "democratic socialism" - meaning more like social democracy - wave has, how much damage it can undo if any.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
we're trapped in frontier mentality in a country that hasn't had frontiers in 130+ years. like if Scandinavians were still working thru Viking Era mores.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
only skimmed the last couple pages but don't think it's insulting to suggest masses of working-class/poor/etc are routinely hugely mislead to vote/act against their interests

astroturfing, dog whistle language, industry (energy, tobacco, soda, whatever) lobbying groups with paradoxical names, you barely have to scratch the surface

I grant it can be hard to draw exact lines between sincere advocacy and cynical manipulation, but that's politics/life in general

"false consciousness" sounds a bit snobby I guess but it's not like Engels was describing a new thing. it's an inevitable feature of democracy, part of the price you pay for openness.

there ain't a good thing yet been invented that some lobbyist/consultant motherfucker won't take an oligarch's check to twist into some perptrating bullshit.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
In any case, the middle and upper classes are being routinely misled and manipulated all day every day themselves.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
idk man, I know devil's advocate follow the point to its rational conclusion is one of vimothy's things but I don't buy this endless, turtles all the way down it's all manipulation thing

I mean sure whatever but it's like saying is the world really real? academically interesting but got fuck-all to do with actually living.

like no one's information or perspective is 100% pure but so what? we're talking about people or institutions made up of people consciously manipulating large numbers of other people to their benefit. those benefits, and the costs that produce them, are real. even if sometimes its harder than other times to discern the causes of the effects.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I mean, late Republican Roman politics were an endless cesspool of rich dudes manipulating poor people and then fucking them over regularly.

the Athenians were so wary of it they coined the term demagogue.

tbf, sometimes the manipulators are to varying degree on the masses' side, but usually not, esp in this day + age.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to bring it back full-circle I bet Rees-Mogg would've fit right in with the stuffy aristo Optimates of the Roman Senate
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
if you feel no anger towards your oppressor and in fact protect them, then you're at one end of that scale (societal Stockholm Syndrome).

For reasons I can't fully explain, I'm a member of several tag groups on Facebook that are mostly constituted by Americans, and fuck me but the most extreme Stockholm Syndrome I've ever seen is in right-wing Americans when it comes to healthcare. I mean, I'm talking about the kind of person who would post this, unironically and approvingly:

randpaul.jpg

And then, when I point out that I live in a country with socialized health care and no, our doctors and nurses are obviously not slaves, will react by posting a Daily Mail article that they obviously googled two seconds earlier about some fuck-up in an NHS hospital. Never mind that the USA has among the worst, and certainly the most expensive, health care in the developed world and is routinely out-performed in WHO rankings by some developing countries. And never mind that, where the NHS does fail, it's largely due to being deliberately mismanaged and under-funded by a government that wants to abolish it and replace it with an American-style for-profit system.

This person's line was that socialized health care was, in some ill-defined way, "selfish". I asked what that made hospitals that charge patients hundreds of dollars for the use of saline bags that cost literally a dollar apiece, and was given the answer that they are "forced" to charge that much by "government red tape".

I mean, this is a person who is presumably able to feed, wash and dress themselves, is permitted to use sharp tools and naked flames, and perhaps even drive a car and do a paid job. But I just cannot process that level of self-delusion. By what mechanism does this occur? It's bizarre.
 
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