I'm a historylad. I'm not personally invested in convincing anyone, I just like discussing this sort of thing. A proper cuntoff would have probably involved personal insults by now. Or shitty one-liners, if we were on Twitter.
>>462021 I even accepted that colonial history had an influence. So >>462022 we're in agreement, no need to have a Christmas teary, mumlad. I'd just say that it's overstated by interests groups for reasons.
>where other countries may have quickly industrialised through enforcing protections on their natural resources, countries with colonial pasts couldn't afford to.
They absolutely could afford to where a functional state existed - that was exemplified by the authoritarian/one-party cleave of OAU politics. Even today trade barriers within the AU can be absolutely eye-watering and that's part of the problem because things just aren't that cheap in Africa relative to purchasing power - Ethiopia being a classic example. I'd say most African states even nationalised their natural resources post-independence and were for a time able to make a fortune during the post-war boom years.
But as I've alluded to rich resources and kleptocrats sowed the seeds of their own destruction as investment naturally gravitated to extractive mono-economies and the frailty of African centres of power leads to natural resources funding decentralised thiefdoms and perpetual civil war. That began during the colonial era but I don't think that deserves to rank as first-mover to why sub-Saharan Africa, certainly today, should be poorly developed. Did British colonial Africa deliberately empower outlying tribal power structures in a deliberate plan or was it the reality of just how bloody difficult it is to exercise sovereignty on a continent where much of it has spent nearly the entirety of its history unknown to the outside world.
In short, you won't find an easy lesson of development here along with the lines of East Asian development.
>>462026 Can you name a time when African countries redrew their borders along tribal lines rather than colonial ones? I'm a different poster but I don't think it's ever happened. However, if it has, I would be very interested to hear about it.
I trimmed a tree today because its branches have been affecting my satellite TV reception. More so in the warmer months with those branches bearing leaves, but in bad weather, signal strength and quality were down even now.
But generally African states are murderously, genocidally opposed to any border changes on principle. There's a realpolitik answer to it that nobody wants to surrender sovereignty, an idealist answer that, like the EU, the AU can create a continent without national friction more akin to South America and then there's acknowledging the reality of what the precedent would lead to - scroll down that wikipedia page to see Europe's border changes or look at the few instances where new African states have emerged (South Sudan, Eretria) and the bloodshed involved.
It's actually an interesting story to look at in how African statehood developed from the idealists of post-independence. There were two strands of thought on the matter that mirror how a lot of supranational institutions go where the OAU in the 60s had idealists lead by Kwame Nkrumah who saw Africa uniting in a federation which was defeated by more national conceptions of unity promoted by the Arab states that saw a looser cohabitation similar to how South America has ended up. It's all very familiar. Just this time the excuse to putting it all off was that they needed to push out the last of the colonial governments and end white minority-rule, which once completed was when the OAU became the AU.
So if you see some long-haired student this Christmas talking about how everything bad that's ever happened is all down to civil servants cracking out the rulers then you can tell him to direct his anger at Morocco and Nkrumah-sceptics.
Thank you for reading my masters thesis on supernationalism in Africa, an effort that was extremely useful because that's the way the world is going and we'll never ever see Britain vote to leave the EU.
I know this is retarded but how do people usually show electronic proof of address, bank statements, etc? I have to upload some info for a self-review thing but can't think how to get the information in, other than scanning at the library, USB and return home or asking a friend to photo with their smartphone then email me the files.
>>462105 I set up an ISA with Vanguard earlier and they wanted me to verify my bank account, so I all I did was pull off a PDF bank statement via Starling's app and upload it.
I have provided proof of funds for buying my house by sending them a screenshot of my internet banking page. That's the only specific example I can remember but I've done multiple proof-ofs this way. 99% of people don't know how to edit an image file if it's not applying a filter to it so apparently that's secure enough.
>>462107 >>462106 Sounds like my new years resolution has to be plugging into the paper-less system; online banking, tesco club points, god forbid facebook.
All of this I'm concerned about doing, but there appears to be no alternative. Starting the online review processes offers only homephone, mobile and email contact options.
>>462108 You can buy a scanner. I don't do any online banking, and I confess it is a ballache to buy a house, or indeed use any banking services when they close all their branches and tell you to just set up an online account, but I have an old printer/scanner and the printer doesn't work but the scanner works fine. I just scanned all my bank statements and wages, and emailed them. I would warn you, though: if you're buying a house, they will ask for six months of bank statements, and in my case, they never actually sent them back even though they said they would.
>>462112 How the fuck did you get a printer/scanner that doesn't shit the bed when the printer is sad for any reason? Waaah, I'm out of yellow ink, can't possibly scan this urgent thing. Wankers.
Anyway, what brand?
>>462113 It's an HP printer that I bought about ten years ago. So you won't be able to buy the same one, but I assume whatever £30 three-in-one piece of shit HP sell now will be similar.
I've been using and recommending Brother printers and printer/scanners for about 15 years. I have never regretted it. If you run out of toner it'll warn you, but it'll keep printing until the pages are completely blank. I've never had one fail, never had one reject an off-brand toner cartridge, never had any bullshit with cloud services or whatever.
If you're planning on scanning a lot of documents, I'd suggest a sheetfed scanner - either a Brother ADS or a Fujitsu Scansnap. You can load a pile of documents in the tray and it'll scan both sides of them automatically, like a reverse printer. An unnecessary luxury if you just need to scan a couple of bank statements, but life-changing if you're self employed and have to deal with loads of invoices and receipts.
>>462114 If you get a HP printer now you will be heavily pushed towards their ink subscription services, which has various price plans but apparently their most common one is £2.99 for printing 50 pages per month. IIRC they often sell printers with 6-12 months free subscription, so it could actually be cheaper to buy a new printer every year or so. That's if you want to buy HP these days, which I wouldn't if I could help it.
HP's home printer business model is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with capitalism in a nutshell. Remember, this is how they'd treat every single appliance and electronic gizmo in your house if they could get away with it, and they are already pushing it that way with cars, which is worrying enough.
I think the general consensus nowadays is that if you want a printer to give you your money's worth, you just have to get a low end laser printer/copier intended for the office market, they cost more up front but they'll last you forever and you won't be beholden to the ink mafia's DRM protection racket.
>>462112 What has possessed you to adopt this lifestyle? Keeping track of your finances must be an absolute arse-ache and I say this as a man who logs everything.
The idea of going to a bank branch does seem faintly ridiculous to me, particularly given that my bank doesn't even have branches. It'd seem a bit like using a payphone or sending a telegram.
>>462121 >It'd seem a bit like using a payphone or sending a telegram.
Now that you mention it, there's a lot of BT payphones on the main streets near me. In one sense it's odd that they've not been removed but as the windows have been caked in a layer of grime they've been repurposed as booths for people smoke crack in which appears to be tolerated by the police. It was perhaps telling that when a pub near me got a new owner who did it up the payphone outside soon had all the glass smashed.
Maybe that's what will happen to bank branches. And in a way probably is given who the fuck else is carrying large amounts of cash these days.
>>462124 We used to be able to make a reverse-charge call as simple hack. Seems trite now, but wanted to get home? Do a reverse call of someone who had a car. You had a couple of seconds to express who was with you and why you needed a lift.
Just thinking about an office job I had not long after I'd left school. My manager was really rude and demanding to me, so a lot of my colleagues tried to get her to lay off me or tried to convince me to stand up for myself. I told them I was just happy to have the job, that I was just going to keep my head down and prove myself, but in truth it gave me a raging hard-on.
>>462126 The other trick to get a short call was "I've put money in but it's gone straight though". Usually got you enough time to tell someone where you were.
>>462125 There are lots of black women on TV nowadays, but there's only one with such an unbearably grating Mancunian accent that she can also tick the class-war identity politics box. Alex Scott doesn't sound kitchen-sink enough. Judi Love and Alison Hammond are the same person. Alesha Dixon is southern. For a certain type of television commissioning editor, only AJ Odudu will O-dodo.
That's an oxymoron. Class is explicitly perpendicular to the grain of the social constructs. Working class is working class regardless of anything else; black gay lesbian doesn't say anything about your material circumstances.
Stop trying to muddy the waters so you and your Tarquin rowing club "look how small my telly is" wanker mates feel less guilty about your privilege. Mancs aren't even getting on telly for working class points, it's just because Manchester has a big media colony so they can run productions cheaper than in That London.
Also bloody hell, anyone else caught in the middle of full on doomsday thunderstorm?
>>462137 >That's an oxymoron. Class is explicitly perpendicular to the grain of the social constructs. Working class is working class regardless of anything else; black gay lesbian doesn't say anything about your material circumstances.
Are you seriously saying there's no such thing as working class culture and politics? It's quite a, controversial statement to make.
>>462139 My use of apostrophe there made me pause. Do you lot tend to write the way you talk, moderate it for online forums or is your written and spoken communication entirely divorced?
I definately find that I will write as if it is how I will talk about something. Which admittedly does impact clarity even if it also makes it a whole lot more personable (sometimes) which does help in the workplace. Americans have even said in the past that they can pick up a strong accent in text I've written so there probably is something there.
Class has become idpol. What class does Keir Starmer belong to? Jeremy Corbyn? Jimmy Savile? For most people, the answer has nothing to do with their socioeconomic background and everything to do with signals of tribal allegiance. The son of a toolmaker can be posh and the privately-educated son of a stockbroker can be a man of the people, because brainworms.
There's distinctuons of culture and politics within the classes, sure, but it's not identity politics, in the specific meaning of the politics of identity. You know those are different things and you are only playing games with semantics if you try and "ah but" it. The only time people seriously try and conflate class with identity politics tropes is when they are makinga bad faith attempt to blur the line between the two, usually to the ends of supporting variously right wing agendas.
And most people who peddle identity politics whatsoever, even the wokey woke "ban statues" PC brigade, are fundamentally right wing, wether they even realise it themselves or not.
And this is the nonsense I'm talking about. You don't self-identify as a social class, you just inherently are. Jacob Rees Mogg can say he's working class if he wants, but he isn't, is he.
To be working class isn't a social construct, it's a real and material factor in your life that will influence your path in life whether you like it or not. Race and gender used to be one of those, but they're really not any more. Sexuality has never been that, no matter what they try and say.
Class still is and always will be more important and more fundamental than any of the others, because it's the only one that overlaps with all of them.
>>462142 >There's distinctuons of culture and politics within the classes, sure, but it's not identity politics, in the specific meaning of the politics of identity.
I'll stop you on this sentence. Think about it, you accept that politics, the big term, is influenced by class but then go out to say a subset of politics (one's politics of identity) isn't politics. I don't think you're trying to argue from a right-wing libertarian standpoint so I can only assume you're missing that the entire socialist movement and the mobilisation of the working class (including one-nation Tory) has been explicitly tied to working class identity. I'd even recommend reading EP Thompson if you've got Christmas reading time remaining.
Remove working class identity in this country and instead revert to a strictly materialist position - now what exactly binds different categories of professions together? How do you build cohesion within an economic class without this when it's so much more natural (indeed encouraged) for working class professions to despise one-another? The whole thing becomes an impossibility and especially so when facing the cohesion of a landed upper class who traditionally operate more like a caste system and when they do fight will resort to the idpol of nationalism to make the working class do the fighting with their opposites.
>>462145 I don't understand what you're getting caught on with this. The material position absolutely can create the cultural identity and that in turn absolutely will shape your own sense of identity.
To put it another way if you won the lottery tomorrow but kept working in the pit would you stop being a coal miner? No.
What if you kept associating with your traditional northern mining community and the people you grew up with, would you still identify more with a stockbroker in London? No.
Contrary to the old joke, there isn't a mental switch in your head that gives you an Etonian accent once you have a certain imaginary number you hit and it won't radically change your politics unless you're operating from a pure position of calculated self-interest, which people don't do.
Does class consciousness have any meaningful influence on contemporary politics in practice? When a majority of managers call themselves working class and a significant minority of unskilled labourers call themselves middle class, how can we even usefully discuss the nature of class relations? What would Marx make of a retired plasterer with a couple of buy-to-let flats?
The coherent analysis of class, and the consciousness of one's relation to it, is vital because without it we devolve to the kind of stunted, self contradictory "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" type of perception you see in Yanks.
The important part is that it's not merely tribal, superficial, but based in shared common interest. This is where you can draw the line between class and race- You can make arguments that they are both inherent, immutable characteristics, a black person can't become white any more than a working class can shake off their roots, no matter how much they perfect their RP accent and study proper dinner party etiquette. But the truth is the cultural aspects of black or Asian or whatever identity that people "bond" over are totally superficial, they don't align around that group's shared self interest.
Again, look at American politics. The "black vote" or the "hispanic vote" or whatever has never acheived anything, because believing your primary defining aspect in relation to the structures of power is the colour of your skin is ultimately a false consciousness.
This is where the line between class and identity politics is vital. Identity politics is false consciousness. It leads people to group together around things that don't actually bind them by shared interest at all. They lose track of their actual status, they start talking about things like "the squeezed middle", and they start to think that because they bought their council house under Right to Buy in the early 90s that they're positive demonstrations of our meritocracy.
>>462140 I talk properly and I write properly. Both are fairly incoherent sometimes, but I have never felt any need to moderate my language here. If this site really does only have three posters, then certainly one of them posts with an accent, and I think several people in real life post here with an accent. It sounds like a preposterous affectation to me, like if someone posted that "man's bare finna wet up blud" and pretended this was a normal way to communicate, but I think most of us here have typed like total bellends at least once or twice in our posts. All I can do is privately hope that our resident four Yorkshiremen fly into a rage when I post too.
>>462140 >I definately find that I will write as if it is how I will talk
Same, though at the detriment to the quality of britfa.gs postings. I feel it's necessary to inject some deserperately needed entertaining character to my otherwise ill-informed and poorly structured posts.
>>462148 In a way it's the proof of concept. The political units have been created and they have relation to specific material conditions whether or not the individual objectively experiences them. It's also telling that they're sticky against changing material circumstances like a professions relative wage and status and an enormous amount of air being spent arguing against it even as inter-generational class divides grow.
>What would Marx make of a retired plasterer with a couple of buy-to-let flats?
He'd tut and stroke his beard menacingly at the petit bourgeoisie who still naively idolise the haute bourgeoisie. Probably, as any anarchist worth his salt will tell you, also mad at how he cherishes his freedom as an independent labourer.
>>462149 >The coherent analysis of class, and the consciousness of one's relation to it, is vital because without it we devolve to the kind of stunted, self contradictory "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" type of perception you see in Yanks.
You mean a collective unconsciousness from the working class. What with Americans identifying themselves as middle class and digging themselves into debt in adoration of the Joneses. That is not a new phenomenon and indeed is arguably the default state. It is precisely illustrative of how class is an identity politics.
>The important part is that it's not merely tribal, superficial, but based in shared common interest.
You keep falling into the construction of a mythical rational man who in any kind of grouping won't advance the common interest of the group, which may at times conflict with their own and that the group may vote for turkey for Christmas. The working class find common cause, their common interest, in holding their working class identity above other loyalties and in absorbing others into the big tent. This is what allows working class consciousness it's power and allows radically different professions and even women to collaborate. It is also why class can still resonate despite the nature class having changed since the days of the Paris Commune.
>Again, look at American politics. The "black vote" or the "hispanic vote" or whatever has never acheived anything
Ah, so I think we're all getting a picture at what drives this dogmatic focus on materialist strawmen that is more reminiscent of the libertarianism.
No, both the Black and Hispanic vote have quite obviously changed the rhetoric of US politics and both will be courted over the coming election. They will both naturally intersect with class dynamics just as working class whites became a voice supporting the black equality movement (and others against) but members will naturally have different views just as will exist in any working class organisation, as even a Leninist interpretation will recognise.
>>462152 Oh and, >>462149, what you mean by identity politics is apparently whatever you don't like. Working class identity is a quintessential example of identity politics, you can't come in and say "no it's not like that" to systematically invalidate any kind of identity but what you proscribe as legitimate.
You're just talking past one another. "Working class" in the sense of whether you have to work for a wage (or a wage below a given level) is not an identity, it's an objective fact of how you work. "Working class" in the sense of whether you consider yourself (or are considered to be) working class is an identity.
Someone who works at Tesco and thinks they're not working class because they did a degree in international relations is working class in sense 1 but not 2, and the buy-to-let landlord is working class in sense 2 but not 1.
>"Working class" in the sense of whether you have to work for a wage (or a wage below a given level) is not an identity, it's an objective fact of how you work. "Working class" in the sense of whether you consider yourself (or are considered to be) working class is an identity.
Having mulled it over I think this proves the original assertion of "people only ever attempt to conflate them to muddy the waters" would appear to have been true.
Class lad is explicitly talking about the need to distinguish the former from the latter, but identity lad refuses to acknowledge there's a distinction at all.
I got two lovely looking sirloin steaks with the idea in mind to make a fancy dinner for the lassie I'll be having round over new year. But the more I think about it, the more I just feel like saving them for myself.
My local chippy used to be good, but they changed owners a few months ago and now they're shite. It broke my heart a little bit. I just don't understand how it's possible to fuck up making chips that badly.
