#1
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33782638

Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn has suggested Tony Blair could be made to stand trial for war crimes over the invasion of Iraq.

#2
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Can't snare the Blair
#3
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can't ponyta the tony.. ta
#4
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#5
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bernie sanders and jeremy corbyn are gonna usher in a grand new era of tepid liberal reformism and accomplish a great number of insignificant things, you heard it here first folks
#6
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
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but Anime is already Real
#7
Poronto
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i have tepid liberal reformist on my resume jack. right there at the top in big letters thats me. thats how you Get a Job, get with it losers
#8
Mike Nelson here.
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LGP did you join yet to be able to vote for Corbyn? since I believe you have that precious right.
#9
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welcome to the desert of the real anime
#10
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"This is about morality. It is about what it is right and proper to believe in the light of all we have learned about what the far left did to human souls when it actually got a chance to engineer them. I can’t listen any more to rhetoric that contrasts the idealism of Corbyn’s supporters with the supposed cynicism, hollowed-out power worship and futile pragmatism of the centre-left. I am a Labour centrist supporter not out of cynicism but out of principle, because I believe the only ethical politics of the left today has to be moderate, reasoning, and sceptical. I am Labour, but I am not a socialist any more."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/08/labour-centrists-like-me-not-cynics-corbynites-pure-socialism
#11
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i will always be more physically repulsed by Things Liberals Say than by Things Conservatives Say. i guess because the latter is like arguing with a child while the former is arguing with someone who is genuinely an feckless idiot but thinks they're a genius
#12
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you could just as well have reversed those
#13
Poronto
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getfiscal posted:

LGP did you join yet to be able to vote for Corbyn? since I believe you have that precious right.



this wd be a manifestation of caring about anything, which is gay

#14
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aerdil posted:

i will always be more physically repulsed by Things Liberals Say than by Things Conservatives Say. i guess because the latter is like arguing with a child while the former is arguing with someone who is genuinely an feckless idiot but thinks they're a genius



absolutely, the young and indignant are insufferable. uni students and clueless journos push the envelope like nobody else when it comes to being exasperatingly stupid and self-righteous.

#15
UNUSUALY COOL
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conservatives are more fun to talk to because they have better tv and drink more
#16
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aerdil posted:

bernie sanders and jeremy corbyn are gonna usher in a grand new era of tepid liberal reformism and accomplish a great number of insignificant things, you heard it here first folks



One of the significant differences between Corbyn and Sanders is that the former is seeking to lead a party which actually did arise from the struggles of a national labor movement, and which, though to a much diminished extant since the onset of Blarism, still reflects those roots.

Another important difference is that the UK, under a hypothetical Anti-NATO left-Labor government, could maneuver away from the Atlantic alliance, while it would be absurd to expect any U.S. President (particularly a Zionist) to voluntarily dismantle the empire.

Edited by RedMaistre ()

#17
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cars posted:

conservatives are more fun to talk to because they have better tv and drink more

u can be the guy who escorts the nazis to the firing line. maybe last rites? ?

#18
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http://imgur.com/a/E6bAa
#19
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Panopticon posted:

http://imgur.com/a/E6bAa



Ed Balls (Ed Balls)

#20
UNUSUALY COOL
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Crow posted:

u can be the guy who escorts the nazis to the firing line. maybe last rites? ?



#21
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +++++
in the interest of the impressionable young minds here: i don't like talking to conservatives more than i do people on the left, or find their values worth defending, i just agree with aerdil that i find talking to left-liberals from the u.s. much more frustrating and pointless because conservatives at least understand that communism is for real. while democratic party types of every age think of socialism as a racial slur invented in 2007 to attack president barack hussein obama, but they also want to talk about my shit all the time like they know, and plus there is a much higher incidence among them of people saying things to me like "brings the funny" and "awesomeness" and "to avoid right wing bias i listen to the BBC", and it's like come on just heil hitler already
#22
mt.real
Post rating: +
idk anything about england other than i like english muffins, but there's some intense frothing at the mouth going on over there about this

TonyB posted:

It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me. But please understand the danger we are in.

The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes “disunity”. It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were possible.

This is not the 1980s. This is by many dimensions worse and more life threatening. Michael Foot was never going to win a general election in the UK. But Michael was a towering figure who had been a major cabinet member in the previous Labour government. Tony Benn was never going to be PM. But he was a huge political character who again had long experience of government.

The unions in the 1980s were, by a majority, a force for stability and sense. There were Labour constituencies so solidly Labour that nothing could shake them from their loyalty. The party that assembled after the 1983 defeat knew its direction. Maybe we didn’t know how far or how fast, but we knew, and the new leader Neil Kinnock knew, that we had to put aside the delusion that we had lost two elections because we weren’t leftwing enough and start to modernise. And our objective was to return to government.

What we’re witnessing now is a throwback to that time, but without the stabilisers in place. The big unions, with the exception of the most successful in recent times, USDAW, are in the grip of the hard left. And the people do not have that same old-time loyalty.

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation. If he wins the leadership, the public will at first be amused, bemused and even intrigued. But as the years roll on, as Tory policies bite and the need for an effective opposition mounts – and oppositions are only effective if they stand a hope of winning – the public mood will turn to anger. They will seek to punish us. They will see themselves as victims not only of the Tory government but of our self-indulgence.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new. This is literally the most laughable of all the propositions advanced by his camp. Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script. These are policies from the past that were rejected not because they were too principled, but because a majority of the British people thought they didn’t work. And by the way, they were rejected by electorates round the world for the same reasons.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/even-if-hate-me-dont-take-labour-over-cliff-edge-tony-blair

#23
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Following an incursion of the platonic ideal of Liberalism into our reality, Blairite Labour is in the grips of a bizarre teleological reversal. Instead of labouring people creating a labour party to represent their interests, the Labour party now believes that it creates its own constituents ex nihilo, like some kind of deranged public school demiurge, and if the interests of the people diverge from the will of their creator then they must be sinful creatures corrupted by the impure world of matter.

Gnostic democracy.
#24
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shriekingviolet posted:

Following an incursion of the platonic ideal of Liberalism into our reality, Blairite Labour is in the grips of a bizarre teleological reversal. Instead of labouring people creating a labour party to represent their interests, the Labour party now believes that it creates its own constituents ex nihilo, like some kind of deranged public school demiurge, and if the interests of the people diverge from the will of their creator then they must be sinful creatures corrupted by the impure world of matter.

Gnostic democracy.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung

#25
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“Tell me what you think is more radical,” she asked: “spending billions of pounds we haven’t got switching control of some power stations from a group of white middle aged men in an energy company to a group of white middle aged men in Whitehall as Jeremy wants, or extending Sure Start, giving mothers the power and confidence to transform their own lives and transform their children’s lives for years to come?

lol

I will say this: Clinton would never use this "Socialism/Keynesianism=racism" rhetoric about Bernie herself, so kudos to her nearest British equivalent, I guess.

Edited by RedMaistre ()

#26
Post rating: +
Alle Waffen gegen Hitler!

The Free French strategy involves effectively withdrawing all support from Corbyn. MPs will not serve in his shadow cabinet, they will not observe the whip, they will not be bound by any sense of collective responsibility to the official party line. Those advocating that strategy are being compared to De Gaulle and those French forces that retreated into exile in Britain, then returned to the French continent on D-Day to liberate their homeland.
#27
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This shit is crazy
#28
Mike Nelson here.
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there was a stir the other day when someone suggested corbyn would bring back the old clause four (committing the party to social ownership of production) and corbyn assured people he only supports public ownership in the limited case of a clear social need such as railways and health care. still i think supporting something because it annoys people you dislike is a solid life strategy.
#29
Post rating: +
I am pessimistic about Corbyn's ability to successfully turn Labour around, let alone come to power in a national government; but he certainly has bought to the foreground the Blairite rot that has eaten away the party's ideology, its social base, and very raison d'etre. A clear split would free up many well meaning and committed people who have stuck through the repeated capitulations of the last two decades and provide new opportunities for left opposition groups to grow, both in the electoral field and, more importantly, on the plane of civil society. If Corbyn's candidacy had not arisen, the pretense that Labour was still the best actually existing option to the Tories could still have carried on a little longer ; now the party's leadership has made it clear that it views its internal left as pretty much the equivalent of Nazis. It seems only the losing struggle to preserve Social Democracy can unequivocally reveal that's its already dead.

Certainly the stakes here are more interesting than the likely outcome of the row between Hillary and Bernie
#30
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
that article makes me think they believe the labour brand is important to keep and that corbyn will have very weak control over the party. this sort of surprised me because my intuition was that the bulk of MPs would desert the party and form some sort of Democratic Party with the rump of the libdems, becoming outright bourgeois and abandoning the unions. Most of the think tanks and such have distanced themselves from labour ideology and would easily move over. Funding wouldn't be a major issue if it's seen as a viable way of sidelining corbyn.
#31
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~
i guess part of the issue is that corbyn would only control a sliver of the party and you've got those thousands of labour councilors and staffers and such all over the place that would have inertia.
#32
mt.real
Post rating: +

getfiscal posted:

that article makes me think they believe the labour brand is important to keep

funny that considering public support seems to be swelling(?) for corbyn and they all want to immediately jump ship and get the hell out of capital-L Labour to make sure that they don't have to do anything so disgusting as supporting small-l labour

#33
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
i admire the idea behind the fabian society, like socialists writing little papers about how like to actually take over the housing sector or something like that instead of debates about how strong tito was or whatever, so i always feel sad when i look at their actual output and most of it is pamphlets about how pensions should require seniors to work as cleaners.
#34
Post rating: +
i keep saying we need more REsearch Units and Investigative Fraktions in our Org's
#35
mt.real
Post rating: +
i will basically do anything if it is called a fraktion
#36
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
one thing i think radicals outside of everyday bourgeois politics often don't realize is how much jockeying goes on within parties and governments. and the language used is mostly very subtle unless they are talking about it to each other informally. actually they seem to be more excited when they say something seemingly mundane which they know will drive their opponents in the bureaucracy insane. i think it's an important way that ideology functions really. because once you're in the party bureaucracy you naturally put one face to the public and another to others in the know.

after gordon brown lost power in britain he wrote a book on the financial crisis and i skimmed a bit of it in the bookstore. he opens with an obviously fake thing about seeing a protestor saying "another world is possible" while he was in a car being shuttled around as prime minister or something, and he's like i wish people knew that i agree with that. like a lot of people in high positions sincerely believe they are outsiders of a sort. like there are a lot of buffoons like steve jobs but the more dangerous people are like colin powell who argue they played along with idiots to moderate them. i'm sure hillary clinton says to herself that she's playing the game to make the changes she needs to rather than like being a crass cynic.
#37
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stegosaurus posted:

i keep saying we need more REsearch Units and Investigative Fraktions in our Org's


it would be wonderful, it is just hard to find the time for it when so many orgs are run ragged just trying to keep existing

#38
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++

shriekingviolet posted:

it would be wonderful, it is just hard to find the time for it when so many orgs are run ragged just trying to keep existing

there was this anarchist webpage a long time ago that had supposedly horrific quotes from lenin. and one of them was lenin saying something like he'd much rather have someone around who knows how to drive a tractor than ten people who just know about socialism. which endeared lenin to me a lot because i might be a bookworm shut-in but that's always what i thought really. my friend made a good point that at the height of socialism's popularity it was very common for tradespeople and such to set up little papers or committees to talk about how socialism would affect their daily life. and it wasn't just like "socialism will give us true control" or whatever, it was like "if we design this specific machine so that we aren't rushed then industrial workers won't die as often which will be cool."

#39
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~

RedMaistre posted:

I am pessimistic about Corbyn's ability to successfully turn Labour around, let alone come to power in a national government; but he certainly has bought to the foreground the Blairite rot that has eaten away the party's ideology, its social base, and very raison d'etre. A clear split would free up many well meaning and committed people who have stuck through the repeated capitulations of the last two decades and provide new opportunities for left opposition groups to grow, both in the electoral field and, more importantly, on the plane of civil society. If Corbyn's candidacy had not arisen, the pretense that Labour was still the best actually existing option to the Tories could still have carried on a little longer ; now the party's leadership has made it clear that it views its internal left as pretty much the equivalent of Nazis. It seems only the losing struggle to preserve Social Democracy can unequivocally reveal that's its already dead.

I said exactly hte same thing about Barack Obama in 2011

#40
Post rating: +

getfiscal posted:

one thing i think radicals outside of everyday bourgeois politics often don't realize is how much jockeying goes on within parties and governments. and the language used is mostly very subtle unless they are talking about it to each other informally. actually they seem to be more excited when they say something seemingly mundane which they know will drive their opponents in the bureaucracy insane. i think it's an important way that ideology functions really. because once you're in the party bureaucracy you naturally put one face to the public and another to others in the know.

after gordon brown lost power in britain he wrote a book on the financial crisis and i skimmed a bit of it in the bookstore. he opens with an obviously fake thing about seeing a protestor saying "another world is possible" while he was in a car being shuttled around as prime minister or something, and he's like i wish people knew that i agree with that. like a lot of people in high positions sincerely believe they are outsiders of a sort. like there are a lot of buffoons like steve jobs but the more dangerous people are like colin powell who argue they played along with idiots to moderate them. i'm sure hillary clinton says to herself that she's playing the game to make the changes she needs to rather than like being a crass cynic.



there is mystification that is important to understand, like money as the mystification of value. there is also mystification which only serves to confuse and make things appear complex that are simple. the functioning of bourgeois government is the latter.