Ah that’s a good one, do you know any more?

Maybe so but at some point Trump is going to tell Starmer to jump on climate change.

I’m not sure what suggests Starmer is in any way interested in proving Nigel Farage wrong about anything. It seems like he’s quite happy to run with whatever narrative the right sets.

When Elon Musk experiments by taking a day off ketamine.

I sort of hate this weird liberal-austerity Vs nationalist-investing dynamic the parties seem to have settled on. “At least one entire political axis must be shit at any given time”. Thanks guys.

For me the problem with being scared of Trump “ruining our economy” is that he might just do it anyway. In fact, the more we play along with him, the more we become dependent on the US, and the more we prop up the order he’s trying to bring about.

The EU and the rest of the world are having success pushing back on the US (see: 90 day delay on tariffs) yet in the UK we act like we’re nothing but powerless mewling kittens who must act cute to survive.

Can you tell us how the Dems are going to reform the voting system so that people’s choices are fairly represented? No? They have no plans for that because they perceive themselves as beneficiaries of a broken electoral system? Wow it’s almost as if they’re self interested crooks themselves

Edit: people downvoting this are the same people who’d hear about coca cola paramilitaries in South America and then switch to Fanta, thinking they’re voting with their wallets

At some point, a bunch of tech bros out there are going to happily put neural interfaces directly in their skulls (probably by deregulated cranial technicians with dirty hands) that will plug them into the marketing and skills dependency directly.

Technically correct because greed is the cause of capitalism. But don’t be fooled into thinking there’s a long term, greed restrained capitalism that is going to work out for us; wealth is power. With sufficient wealth, a man can raise an army.

As soon as you allow him to accumulate it, you raise the possibility that he will buy your politicians and corrupt your citizens through amplifying his messages to make society ever greedier in his image. He will hire people to make unlawful works, and pay the fines and dodge the court room.

When you resist this corruption, they respond with fascism.

“An eco-zealot”, “a net-zero fanatic”…, an “eco-Marxist”

I wish ed miliband was this cool

Here’s some free speech for you: Trump and Starmer are both arseholes of the highest order. So I fully expect Starmer to gape wide open and catch whatever rains down out of the US’s twitching sphincter. Labour needs to do a coup real bad.

You say “social network”, I say barely attended vbulletin install. Potato, patahto

Starmer’s such an embarrassment. While the rest of the world was telling Trump “no!”, he was there down by the dog bowl. Now he looks both naive and lacking in principle as trump has been pushed back effectively by everyone else.

I don’t know if they quite appreciate how if programmers are cooked like this, everyone who isn’t a billionaire is too. Let me introduce you to robot transformer models.

I’ve come around to the idea that ultimately socialist countries live under constant pressure from capitalists to collapse, from birth. Thinking about the history of the USSR in particular, it went from counterrevolution, to WW2/Nazi invasion to open US backed sabotage with very little breathing room.

The birth of liberal nations was also messy. The US started with probably the largest genocide, that of native Americans, in known history. Revolutionary France was no picnic either.

On the other side of the coin, lib socialists/anarchists have unfortunately been crushed by their neighbours repeatedly. Thinking about the Paris commune, revolutionary Catalonia, etc. I think we would all love to live in a world of nothing but love and peace, but there are bad, selfish guys out there who will smoosh your utopia in a heartbeat.

This ends up necessitating some degree of authoritarianism as a self-defense mechanism.

We are now being presented with the reality: that it was never a choice between peaceful exploitation under capitalism and idealistic but authoritarian socialism, just that the capitalists were biding their time and building support for just long enough to make it seem like a viable driver of increased living standards. The capitalists are done with worker power and are bringing down the hammer. They are bored and want us to war again.

The Soviets were accused of creating Potemkin villages, the capitalists created entire Potemkin “service economies” that barely produce anything, funded/enabled by historical imperial wealth and power dynamics.

We are then presented with a choice, do we want working people to be in charge? Or do we want to let the wealthy treat us like their property?

They don’t have to be new or good. Or recently washed.

Crohn’s here. You would not believe what my body can produce. The other side of it as well is when you really need to go, and somebody has thoroughly destroyed the only available cubicle(s). I once just walked out the state of the loos was so bad. It’s ok to touch the toilet brush to sort out your own stuff people 😭

They did a doctor who episode about this. It turned out to be a Bad Thing. I’m not sure what the deal with this trend of turning warnings into reality is, I can only assume it has something to do with who’s holding the purse strings of scientific research.

Yeah I think the main driver is neoliberal austerity doing what it does. The wing of the party in charge are basically Thatcherites. They want to the market to decide who gets access to basic necessities and bureaucracy to decide anything else.

In general I think neoliberals are becoming embarrassed by the fact that evidence based medicine is increasingly at odds with capitalistic ideals around how workforces should comply with the rich. So they want to introduce an apparently technocratic (which will inevitably be as low skilled tickbox bureaucratic as you like) body to replace actually qualified people - doctors- in this area.

I think it’s also a bit of a reaction to changes in the geopolitical scene. They’re hoping that in the event of further war in Europe that desperate but physically able people will be coerced into the military. By taking the ability to decide who is sick out of the hands of doctors and into the state they make this a lot easier. Similarly, more money for manpower and munitions by not paying out in benefits.

A few thoughts: we’re not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.

That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) and go “hey, great job, we’ve really grown the economy!”

We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves “let’s have some more of that”.

So we’re in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn’t poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it’s filtering through to the middle class now as well.