the socialism of fools

[padraig (u.s.)]

back on the general topic of the election this

Dickens couldn't have made up more ludicrously evil villains as this crop of Tories

is 100% true. Dickensian villains would gape in horror at Rees-Mogg. I mean, 12th century feudal barons would gape in horror (they wouldn't but they'd give him serious side-eye).

how does your country produce these people? it's like that part of the ruling class has somehow steadily regressed for the last 200 years.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

not that we don't have a wide array of political grotesques ourselves, but at least you don't have to worry about them wearing monocles

 

[luka]

back on the general topic of the election this



is 100% true. Dickensian villains would gape in horror at Rees-Mogg. I mean, 12th century feudal barons would gape in horror (they wouldn't but they'd give him serious side-eye).

how does your country produce these people? it's like that part of the ruling class has somehow steadily regressed for the last 200 years.

I don't fucking know it's unbelievable. I have to go to work though enough spluttering from me for one day

 

[Mr. Tea]

I have no doubt that people will look back at the Corbyn era in utter astonishment. This spectacle of millions of self proclaimed lefties desperately scrabbling about for any reason not to vote for Corbyn all in the face of the most monstrous, comically evil Tory government of all time.

Rees Mogg goes on radio and says the people who died at Greenfell were stupid, why didn't they just walk out the building if it was on fire and all the left wing people go, maybe I'll vote lib dem. You couldn't make it up. A testament to the extraordinary power of the media to shape opinion.

Britain isn't America and we don't have presidential elections here. Nobody who doesn't live in Islington North (where he's safe as houses) can vote for Corbyn. For a lot of progressive voters, stopping Brexit, and especially the kind of Brexit we're going to get with the Tories in charge, is the main priority, on the grounds that governments come and go but Brexit will be forever.

But whether your main priority is getting a Labour government in *or* stopping a Tory Brexit, it makes perfect sense to vote Lib Dem in a Tory/LD marginal seat where a vote for Labour is a waste of a vote.

 

[DannyL]

Padraig: Public schools (i.e. boarding schools). There's a whole load of material about the damage it does to development. Basically, taking kids away from families to encourage them to bond with the institutions of school as a rehearsal for identifying with the institutions of Empire/state- military, colonial civil service etc.

 

[DannyL]

This is how they do it:


I think with Rees Mogg, there's an element of self-caricature at work? Maybe?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Public schools (i.e. boarding schools)

yeah I know about that

"the Battle of Waterloo was won of the fields of Eton" etc (not what he actually said, but the sentiment is what's important)

and I read most of the Flashman series, which besides satirizing the Victorian era generally is specifically a satire of that public school->imperial officer model

what how I don't get is how it's making it people somehow worse than they were 200 years ago

Victorian aristos at least had to couch their worst tendencies in pious hypocrisies

I guess the answer is probably combining that model with the worst tendencies of late capitalism and post-Empire ghost limb irredentism

 

[DannyL]

I sort of think of him as an elaborate trolling attempt. There must be some degree of self awareness, how he comes over, how annoying it is. "First as tragedy, then as farce".

 

[luka]

There's a trolling tendency with a lot of tories. It happens a lot with children who are disliked. Negative attention is better than no attention.

 

[luka]

Snap

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

yall may already know, that Rees-Mogg recently published a book literally about Victorian leaders

it got overwhelmingly negative reviews

with the lone exception of arch-Tory and Imperial apologist Andrew Roberts (i.e. the guy who defended the Amritsar massacre, which even at the time no one would do)

you really could not make this shit up

 

[DannyL]

Matt Woebot was at school with him wasn't he? There's a thread somewhere where he talks about throwing bog roll at him.

 

[DannyL]

who was there when i was at school was jacob rees-mogg. his house was beside mine. people used to come to my room and throw wet loo-roll out of the window at him as he entered that building below. jacob used to walk around, a rod for a back, with an umbrella at all times. i think he used to have a poster of margaret thatcher on his wall. at all times he was robotic and spoke to people (not arrogantly as such) as though they were infantile. honestly i don't think he would be a healthy choice for the kind of person to be prime minister.

 

[john eden]

Re: Movement

The reduction in the cost of the membership fee and the subsequent election of Corbyn as leader has massively rejuvenated the Labour Party which I believe now has the biggest membership of any party in Europe. This is still the case after a bunch of people left.

It isn't yet what I would consider a fully fledged social movement personally. It's an electoral machine and partly a Corbyn fan club. I think that's an impressive feat on its own terms though - the fact that you can for once get trade unionists, people who tore up their cards during the Gulf War, trots and anarchists to be in the same room is remarkable.

It sounds like there are some people like McDonnell, Jeremy Gilbert, and some of the people in Momentum who are serious about transforming the membership into a social movement but I know from personal experience that elections always dominate these things and a lot of the reflection, political education, putting down roots in communities and workplaces stuff never ends up happening.

And let's be honest it suits the Labour Party machine down to the ground to have thousands of young canvassers who might aspire to becoming local councillors out there. They will obliterate all comers in the ground war.

I think that's the tension really - can the Labour Party become more than an electoral device? I doubt it personally.

 

[john eden]

There's a trolling tendency with a lot of tories. It happens a lot with children who are disliked. Negative attention is better than no attention.

This Sartre quote is maybe more relevant to Tories than the kind of left-wing anti-semtism we are discussing I think:

 

[version]

this is why the ultra-rich have been buying newspapers the last few years. like jeff bezos buying the washington post.

There are rumblings that Bannon's looking to buy The Telegraph.

 

[DannyL]

Pretty strong piece tying together ideas of anti-semitism with populism and conspiracism: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why...7z7SErZj-Lze4tVv5fjl3aMSgVB2d-8Uy-eMahxmhHjhE

Populist movements harness the politics of resentment to the advancement of those who assume the right to speak for ‘the people’. Anybody in the way is treated as ‘enemy of the people’. They build personality cults around leaders who act as empty ciphers into which every individual can pour their own dreams. The leaders offer us revenge against those who we can blame for our own feelings of inadequacy.

The populist demagogues construct communities of the good and they cast out those who do not fit. The Corbynites call the bad people, the ‘one per cent’, the Zionists, the bankers or the elites. The Brexiters call them betrayers of the will of the people or they denounce those who side with foreign nations and bureaucrats against ‘us’. There is much contempt for the ‘liberal elite’, cosmopolitans, globalists and citizens of nowhere. Populism embraces nostalgic nationalism but it has one eye on a more radical project for the whole of humanity.

Populism tends to explain inconvenient facts by reference to ‘fake news’, conspiracies which are said dishonestly to manufacture the consent of ordinary folk to their own subordination. It is contemptuous of science and expertise; only the charismatic leader knows..."

 

[luka]

I don't think that is a very strong piece Danny. Do you really think the Labour Party practices populist politics of a kind that allows the author to categorise it with the national front in France and Trump's Republican Party? I think that's pretty weird tbh.

 

[luka]

Trump and the National Front use immigrants and Muslims as the enemy. It's more damaging in the case of a Trump in as much as he actually holds power and oversees a program of reckless sadism in which children are separated from their parent and locked up without even the basic amenities. Notwithstanding all the inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and Mexicans.

I don't see the parallel with Corbyn really. Silly piece. Cynical. Sinister.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It goes way overboard by bracketing Corbyn with leaders who have "contempt for democracy" - for one thing, he's only the leader of an opposition party, not a country. But the parallels with Trump are plain to see: a tendency towards conspiracy theories, economic nationalism, an obsession with the idea that economic problems are the fault of an identifiable, malignant minority rather than being baked into capitalism as a whole, and an obsession with the "MSM".

Which is certainly not to say they're as bad as each other, or that blaming all of society's problems on bankers and Zionists is morally equivalent to blaming Mexican immigrants.