https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/05/who-are-the-favourites-to-succeed-boris-johnson

Penny Mordaunt is very attractive, I don't know her politics, but if she is PM we could rival New Zealand and Finland as nation with hottest leader.

>>96207

Attractive? That article only rates her 6/10

>>96206
Suella Braverman said on ITV's Peston last night that she would run if a leadership challenge happened. Her main policy that she seemed most passionate about was tackling "all this woke rubbish", which seems a bit rich coming from a bloody woman. Must be that time of the month. She also talked about how her parents came to this country with nothing, but sadly there was no mention of the National Front correctly informing her of just how much black there is in the Union Jack.

Steve Baker has also said he wants to run and wants to tackle wokeness, but at least he's English and won't constantly be distracted by pictures of shoes, so he's not a hypocrite at least.

>>96207

Conservative Home run regular polls of verified Tory members. Their polling suggests that Sunak would lose badly in a run-off with Mordaunt, Wallace or Truss. The bookies still have Sunak as 5/2 favourite, but unless they think there's going to be some sort of shenanigans to avoid a full leadership election, I think they've badly misjudged this one. I already got a decent lump of money on Mordaunt when she was 11/1, but I'm definitely getting a few quid on Wallace at his current 6/1 price.

https://conservativehome.com/2022/07/03/our-survey-next-tory-leader-wallace-leads-mordaunt-by-two-votes-in-over-seven-hundred/

>>96210
I don't think the next Prime Minister has even announced they're running yet. Because otherwise, it will have to be one of them, and I really don't want that. And I expect to see a very crowded field, in the absence of anyone who looks like they'd be remotely good at it. Everyone's going to fancy a pop.

I'm guessing it's Brexit related, but it's impossible to get carrots recently that aren't going off after a few days. Often they've started going a bit mushy at the tip when they're still in the shop.

>>96085
I think that's because they get pumped full of water, rather than going off at all. I've been having this issue for months and they absolutely are all horrifically watery. I've been tempted to try roasting them to see if that dries them out a bit, but I am no chef.

A lot of the cost of living Crisis is being blamed on Ukraine or Brexit or whatever but the profit-inflation spiral was predicted and studied in detail by Nobel Prize winning Japanese Ecinomist Yakamoto Futunari as far back as 2011.

Google Futunari Inflation to learn more.

>>96088

It'd help if you spelled Futanari correctly.

>>96089

Thanks fellow economistlad

BBC News again full of pro-Boris vox pop.

>>95971

Sooz Kempner is the one with cracking norks who does standup shows about retro gaming.

>>95970
>>95976
She looks like a lass I used to know who was a serial online slag, which is quite satisfyingly as it takes me back to being 19 and watching her flash her tits on webcam. Kids these days are spoiled when it comes to sexting, back in my day you had to find a gem.

>>95977
I do miss the days of AoL Chat, MSN Messenger and the like.

>Senior Labour MP Harriet Harman will lead an inquiry into whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled Parliament over parties in No 10 during lockdowns. The cross-party Privileges Committee, made up of seven MPs, issued a call for evidence after meeting on Wednesday. It said it would be seeking "witness information and evidence" and that hearings would begin in the autumn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61984704

I think the important question on all our minds is will ARE SOOZ do a follow-up top? Followed by which is her favourite clan on VtMB.

>>96063

I'm not talking about being out of ideas on policy. I'm talking about being out of ideas on how to propagandise their way to victory.

They got themselves here with a simple narrative about the benefits fraud and the immigrants. All that tabloid white noise for years and years that I remember throughout my teens and early adulthood, that's all it was ever about. That's what put people off Labour. "Well they want to bring in bloody bongos until there's no room left and give 'em all free houses don't they!", that was the achilles heel that brought Labour down, and it's what kept the current government in power for a long time. It's why they eventually had no choice but to hold the Brexit referendum, to stop UKIP splitting their vote. They made a Faustian bargain by unleashing that old National Front undercurrent of working class patriotism and instinctual xenophobia, and Mephistopheles will be coming to collect soon.

Now, for the first time I can remember, none of those issues are at the front of the public's mind. We've got our way and got the Brexit, so obviously the immigrants are solved. The benefits system has been cut down as far as you possibly can without outright starving people to death, so nobody can claim they're the ones ruining the economy. But more importantly, the papers haven't been running those sorts of story for a long time, so it's fallen out of the public consciousness. They're desperately trying to keep that flame burning with shite like the Rwanda plan, but it's not working. It's not touching the sides. People are feeling very real economic pain, and there's no convenient narrative to blame it all on. So the blame falls squarely at their own feet.

Their time's not up just yet, to be sure, but we've come out of a period of extremely unusual political tides, and fallen somehow into a very conventional and easily understood one. Prices going up, everyone getting worse off, and the government basically telling us "lol deal with it". That's very easy to capitalise on even for a party as pathologically averse to imagination as Labour- Hopefully, they will pay someone to have an imagination for them.

>>96066

Also the last visible sign of ARE CUNTRY BEING FLOODED WITH THEM BONGOS is the channel crossings, which can't possibly be blamed on Labour.

What tickles me about the current moment is that it's basically 1978 but with the roles reversed. Labour got their reputation for being shit with money in the 1970s, when inflation was running rampant and the unions were striking for 15% pay rises. Wilson and Callaghan made a lot of genuine mistakes, but they were also the victims of unavoidable bad luck, particularly with a massive increase in oil prices coinciding with a global recession.

The current crisis could have implications that last for decades.

>>96055
This is the exact mindset I'm talking about. Even if Starmer runs full pelt away from every vaguely leftwing cause, he's still going to be labled a bloody red communist by the likes of Johnson, his cabinet and his allies in the media and in business. I'm not saying Starmer call a new international, form people's militias and start a revolution, what I am saying is that you have to take a hold of the narrative or it will leave you behind, or worse be turned against you wholesale. I already explained why much of the population is lukewarm on strikes, because the only people setting the agenda about them are right-wing politicians and media. If you're going to be forced the share the responsibility for the strikes no matter what, then you may as well make the case for them. Even if you aren't wholly in support of them, the idea that the opposition can be seen to have effectively no opinion on massive, nationwide strike actions is absurd. It makes Starmer, and Labour as a whole, look like a nonentity. Also absurd is the thought that "oh well, people don't like strikes, what could we, the Labour Party, possibly do to change minds on this issue?" This is nothing to do with ideology, this is everything to do with practicality. It's certainly no more ideological than pretending to have nothing to say about anything, no matter how hard you try to arbitrarilly draw the line at which "sensible politics" ends and "dangerous ideology" begins.

There's also the risk that come election time, no one will know what Labour are going to do if they are elected. Will a few weeks really be enough time to impose themselves on the minds of the British public? What if some new, colossal, monstrous news story is hogging the news coverage? A Third World War or a COVID-19 variant the size of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier? If you spend four years playing the political umpire people might not find it credible when you suddenly climb down and pick up a racket.

>>96082

I share your frustrations in the Labour is unwilling to take the swan by the neck (is that a saying or have I made it up?), but at the same time, too much pragmatism becomes a dangerous ideology all of its own, I fear.

The trouble with strikes and a good old fashioned people's movement these days, is that the only people who are still unionised, and still have enough clout that their union actually matters, are pretty well off already. You know, because they are unionised, and because their union has clout. So we could see a near total public service strike, but it'd be dead easy for the papers to write it off, and always will be. GP's are moaning that they might have to work Saturdays, for instance, and I'm sorry, but even as a dyed in the wool red and NHS worker myself, I simply have no sympathy at all there. I mean, cry me a fucking river. Know what I mean?

The people who need to be striking are the people who are always forgotten about at the edges of the NHS, people who are buried in boring admit jobs at your local council, people who are criminally undervalued but nevertheless vital to the running of the country. People who it can't be argued are spoiled already. People who you can't spin to look like they're making unreasonable demands.

That's stage one of the problem, but stage two is actually having the influence to get your message across. The media will never be the left's friend, so there needs to be actual grassroots support. You can't seize the narrative if nobody will print what you say, if nobody on TV will give you airtime, and when they do, it's only an invitation to dig yourself a hole. That's the part that's really hobbling Labour these days.

>>96083
>That's stage one of the problem, but stage two is actually having the influence to get your message across. The media will never be the left's friend, so there needs to be actual grassroots support. You can't seize the narrative if nobody will print what you say, if nobody on TV will give you airtime, and when they do, it's only an invitation to dig yourself a hole. That's the part that's really hobbling Labour these days.
I'm reminded of these lines from https://www.compassonline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Compass-Reclaiming-Modernity-Beyond-markets_-2.pdf again.
Worse, I'm reminded that Labour's still stuck in the same trap. It seems probable that, whatever else it does, the next Labour government will do nothing to make it easier for the Labour government after that to take office.

Labour could do with an actual cynical-pragmatic faction, rather than the status-quo seekers that currently make up the "pragmatists". Imagine a gang of sociopaths who couldn't care less about workers, but want to give unions more rights because it'll mean more membership subs, which they can convince unions to donate to Labour so they can continue sitting around the cabinet table. Or at the very least a few Shirley Porters in local government sticking homeless shelters in the wards that don't vote Labour...

>>93680
Because of their scarcity - the weather also plays a big part in the variability of food prices.

>>93678

The great economist Abba Lerner actually put forward a similar idea to this, in response to the stagflation of the 70s.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1978/06/1978b_bpea_lerner.pdf

>>93678
>>93683
Surely if wage stagnation would arrest inflation then the past 10 years would've proved it, if not been part of a long-trend of multi-decadal deflation. Unless it's all been counteracted by the government giving free money to people with connections and property 'investors'. Oh dear I've made myself angry.

>>93678

Theoretically, maybe, but it presents a huge co-ordination problem. One of the key catalysts of the Winter of Discontent was the imposition of pay increase controls in an attempt to limit inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent#Incomes_policy

Wales basic income: Pilot will give care leavers £19,000 a year

A £20m experiment offering a basic income to young people leaving care will launch in Wales on Friday.

From 1 July, the Welsh government will offer about 500 18-year-olds £19,200 a year before tax - no strings attached.

One care leaver said the cash would be a "safety blanket" and others hope it will help give the 18-year-olds a good start.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-61950546

I think people should study what they want to study so they learn and reach fruition as a person. People love to whinge about Blair but people getting an education is a fundamentally good thing and I don't think forcing the arty lad into a career he never wanted is the right idea. If anything it feels like a plaster on more fundamental problems with the education system.

>>96073
>Training an AI to perform routine clerical work

Truly reaching for the starts there aren't you.

>>96074
>In a broader sense though, what I'm saying is: Where do you think that classism comes from? It gets drilled into you from somewhere. Some of it is from background social osmosis, TV, films, the like, but in terms of straightforward career prospects, the majority of it is school. When you actually stop and think about the way our "education" system works, the main thing it actually teaches you is your place.

Having done both I think it's fair to say that a lot of people working 'hands on' jobs are cunts. People who have only ever been a corporate drone are also cunts but it's more of that bitchy aspect.

>>96076
Quite right that getting educated is a fundamentally good thing, but we do need to draw the distinction between that and getting an education, especially nowadays when any cunt can download a copy of Ashcroft and Mermin from libgen and teach themselves solid state physics at their own pace, probably to greater effect than most universities could. I'm saying this as a career academic, higher education is little more than a qualification-printing service and most of the genuinely smart people I've known in science and in life have been self-taught.

>>96077
It's a good thing universities teach how to learn, think critically and research then.

>>96076

>Truly reaching for the starts there aren't you.

Most people who work in an office are engaged in routine clerical work. They might not think that it's routine clerical work, but they're basically an algorithm in an easy-iron shirt. You have to go a long way up the org chart before you find people who actually have meaningful autonomy; practically everyone else just turns a predictable set of inputs into a predictable set of outputs.

>>96078

>It's a good thing universities teach how to learn, think critically and research then.

If they're actually trying to do that, then they're failing miserably. Everyone I know who uses scientific literature as a resource has a very poor opinion of academia due to the incredibly poor signal-to-noise ratio of supposedly prestigious journals. It's very rare to find a paper that is actually replicable. At best, no more than 5% of papers contain even a crumb of useful data - the rest are just concoctions of bad statistics, undocumented methodologies and outright fabrication that serve no purpose other than to produce an impressive-looking abstract and a line on someone's academic CV. The literature is drowning in bullshit, because the incentives to publish vastly outweigh the incentives to verify. Given how low the standards are in the hard sciences, I shudder to think of the absolute bollocks they must be churning out in the humanities.

>>96079
I feel like you wind up with a problem where a bullshit humanities paper might always have a higher value than a bullshit scientific paper. If you bullshit a paper about chemistry or physics then your rocket isn't going to work. The use of the thing is tied directly to practical application. By contrast if you bullshit a paper about philosophy or even about politics or history, you might still have written something interesting and novel that can be built upon in some way.
It feels like the kind of thing that someone would usually say to attack the validity of the humanities as a whole, but I'm viewing it as an entirely neutral difference. I've nothing against paying people to write nonsense without any practical application if they're writing interesting nonsense. Nobody should have to write filler, though. Filler is boring.

Labour take it with a majority of 5k.

ARE JAYDA got 23 votes, and wasn't even on the stage for the declaration. Lib Dems lost their deposit.

>>96036
>best cheesy chips
A bold claim for any place where chip spice is not the norm.

Lib Dems take Tiverton on a majority of 6k. 30% swing.

Swing to Labour in Wakey is around 12%.

These by-election results have driven Oliver Dowden to resign as party co-chairman. That's the best news. He is a seriously ugly motherfucker with a permanently sneering face, a bit like Priti Patel's smirk. I hate to look at him. What excellent news that he hopefully won't be on the telly for a bit.

So far the only political refugee to leave England for Rwanda is Boris Johnson himself.

Can't decide whether I should spend me £650 on a new guitar or a gender bending prostitute.

>>95928

Why not both? Get a sensibly priced Classic Vibe Squier, then get your dirtbox wrecked by a chick with a dick.

>>95928

If you adopt a pet Ukranian, you could push it to PRS SE money and have money left over for the prozzie.

I got one last year (a PRS I mean, not a ladyboy prozzie) and after dropping some new pickups in (reproductions of the ones what Jimmy Page had in his Les Paul, allegedly) I can comfortably say it'll be the last guitar I ever buy*. Feels nicer than some top end Gibsons I've tried over the last few years, and you don't have to be reminded it's a knock-off every time you look at the headstock like with a Squier/Epiphone.

(*It definitely won't, but you know what I mean. It could be, if I had anything else to spend my disposable income on, like a social life or a family)

>>95928
Why not get the guitar and roger yourself with the neck.

>>95929
>>95930
If I get myself a Ukrainian then I don't need the prozzie.

I already have three good electrics so this is more of a bout of mindless consumerism and chasing after the "one" than any genuine need.

I'm sure PRS's are great but I can't get over the bird inlays most of them have.

God I wish we had AV over here. I don't know much about Aussie politics but by the sounds of what I heard on the radio, it at least makes elections a lot more interesting. None of this endless hung parliament gerrymandering shite like we get over here.

>>95876
One thing I have found out, and like, about Aussie politics during my passing interest with this election is that they have a ban on politicians employing spouses and relatives. It never occured to me you could just stop it like that. I'd never have to hear about £60,000 a year of public money being laundered through some oafish MP's missus.

>>95877

What I find, being from Yorkshire, real Aussies will speak their mind. Call you a cunt until you put in the yakka. Metro Melbos fucked it.

>>95876
ABC coverage was available to stream on YouTube. You'll see the legend that is Antony Green talking through the numbers from time to time. He's like John Curtice but less academic and more techy.

A couple of years ago I met him and he described how it all works. The AEC decides in advance who the top two candidates are going to be. Ballots are counted at polling station, and they initially report the first preference totals and the two-candidate preference totals. If it turns out they guessed wrong or there's a closer run for second place than expected, then they stop reporting 2CP and just report out the full count, which takes longer as they need to wait for all the stations to count each round individually. They were waiting days for a result in 2016 because the AEC got a lot of their 2CP calls wrong, and so both sides were stuck in the 60s with a dozen full counts to do.

Green's evaluation of the UK going to AV was that we would need to be prepared to give up election night if we insisted on bringing all the ballot papers to count centres and only putting out numbers when complete rounds of counting were completed. He's able to make projections after a few hours only because numbers are available for individual locations.

>7 seats in doubt

Count faster you lazy fucking convicts.

>>94420
>A statement from clubnight, Pipe, said: "Thanks to all the amazing people, and Michael Gove..."
Brilliant.

>>94420

Good to see that Gove is handling his divorce with dignity.

TBH I wouldn't be surprised if this was some sort of guerilla marketing campaign to put people off going to nightclubs.

>>94420
Apparently he tried to get out of paying the entry fee by saying he's the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

This is his attempt at creating a 'Boris' style public persona, isn't it? GOVEY, WHAT A LEDGE.

>>94425
There's absolute no way that any reasonable human being wouldn't/shouldn't attempt to get away with skipping a five quid entry fee by using that particular aspect of their arsenal.

"But mate, I'm a knight of the realm, can you give us 2 for a fiver"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_wyHfkd1dw

>>95760

I think the properly evil ones do have just as, if not more of a toxic work culture, it's just that they put so much effort into brainwashing their staff we never hear about it.

I always think it's a giant red flag if a company has things like those open plan kitchen areas in the office, pool tables, football tables, and tells you you're "free to take a break whenever you like", because "they value happy, motivated staff!" or some such bollocks. Because you just know, it's not real. It's definitely one of those Lacanian social taboos like Slavoj Zizek always talks about, where there are rules you're allowed to break, and permissions you are absolutely forbidden from actually using.

Just the fact Google has the motto "don't be evil" has always seemed to me self evident proof that they are unquestionably the most evil business in operation today.

>>95761
>>95762
>>95763

Further to this I would imagine charities and other such good causes attract a lot of narcissist god-complex headcases. Much like if you take a look through the supposedly tolerant, liberal, progressive parts of the internet, you'll invariably find nothing but a cesspit full of bullies and their sycophants, it's just such an easy environment for such people to take advantage of.

I work in the NHS and our department has a truly revoltingly toxic habitual bully, who they (i.e management) simply can't shift. All she has to do is play the victim every time she gets dobbed in, make a bit of noise about bringing in the union, and get a sick note for "stress" for good measure, and they're effectively powerless to sack her. She knows the rules inside out, so she knows exactly what she can get away with.

On a larger scale, when you have a lot of people like that in an organisation, the only way anything ends up getting done is when it boils over into a nasty press expose that requires a big performative house-cleaning to salvage their PR.

>>95763

>Just the fact Google has the motto "don't be evil" has always seemed to me self evident proof that they are unquestionably the most evil business in operation today.

Good news:

The most famous phrase in Google’s corporate philosophy, “Don’t be evil,” has been almost entirely removed from the technology giant’s code of conduct.

Google, which is now a subsidiary of Alphabet after a corporate restructuring in 2015, previously included the phrase “Don’t be evil” at the very start of its code, and another two times within the first two paragraphs.

The simple language was replaced by vague and less specific wording such as “ethical business conduct”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/google-dont-be-evil-code-conduct-removed-alphabet-a8361276.html

>>95765
I am pretty sure they did this a long while back. Why is it news now?

>>95766
It isn't, his post is responding to someone else who hadn't realised it had happened, slowlad.

>>95750
Can you clarify what you mean by "semi-socialist"? I feel that might shed some light on the answer to your question.

>>95750

Partially because she's not a proper socialist, and partially because they hate the working class. The crisis for a certain segment of the left in modern times is that they want to represent a working class, just not the working class we actually have.

I don't mind her. It's hard to say I like her, because I suspect she's about as principled as any of them, which is to say not at all. But she's certainly one of the best of a bad bunch.

>>95752
damned if I know. I went to her website, to see what values she espouses. I am none the wiser. This is about as close as I got:

“From the beginning of my working life I’ve always stood up for working people, first as a Trade Union rep representing care workers and then as a regional union official. Now I use the skills I’ve developed to represent the communities of Ashton, Droylsden and Failsworth.”

It's a remarkably content-free website. Maybe that's best.

>>95754
It's always sad to see how trade unionists fall into this. Imagine how daft and ineffectual it must all feel.

Phwoar. This Neil Parish story is getting pretty intense.

>Britain has agreed to take refugees in from Rwanda under Priti Patel’s landmark deal, it has emerged.

>Those who fled war or persecution and were granted asylum status by Rwanda will be able to come to the UK under a reciprocal scheme signed by the Home Secretary last week. The crucial detail in the agreement’s small print – which could lead critics to reappraise the agreement – emerged only after Miss Patel returned from the East African nation on Friday.

>It states: ‘The participants will make arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom, recognising both participants’ commitment towards providing better international protection for refugees.’

>A Home Office source said it would apply to ‘a number in the tens, not hundreds’ of people who have already been granted refugee status in Rwanda. However, the agreement states no limit. The refugees who are brought to this country are likely to be those with the most complex needs, it is understood, such as those with physical or mental health problems.

Let's replace able-bodied migrants from the Middle East with those needing mental health services from Doctor Congo. After all, the NHS and mental health services in particular aren't under strain.

>>95612

It's all going to plan old chap, the trouble is Poles and Lithuanians weren't profitable enough. Our hard working property investors need much more stable assets.

>>95607

Most of those post are made by the same person, Simon Ombongo.

>>95609
The official travel advice is a bit of a roller coaster: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/rwanda/safety-and-security

Petty crime is low outside of Kigali, but beware of occasional grenade attacks.

>>95602 Perhaps you could ask your MP and then let us know? Maybe you could also ask why our Home Secretary is a cross between Indira Modi and Rita Repulsa?

>>95204

>Trotsky went around insisting the USSR was capitalist. Granted, Stalin evidentially didn't like that one bit.

As far as I can tell, nobody really liked Are Leon all that much. Not sure what the beef was mind you, because I'm not enough of a nerd to have read up on him yet.

>Lenin also argued positively for state capitalism in the earlier part of the USSR's existence.

I think Lenin was more towards that OG Marxist type of sentiment that communism has to come about as the inevitable end-point transformation of capitalism itself, or else it will fail. I tend to agree with that. The trouble with most communist countries throughout history is that they forced it in too soon, when those countries were barely industrialised before it.

>>95206
Stalin believed in "socialism in one country": if you can achieve glorious communism in your own country, all the other countries will follow suit when they see how good it is, so you don't need to go interfering in their business until then.

Trotsky preferred "permanent revolution": seize every opportunity to bring every country closer to communism, so that they eventually all become communist around the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_one_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution

So yes, Trotsky sounds like he had the potential to have been even more of a madman than Stalin was, crazy though that seems.

>>95201

>it pivoted to state capitalism
>an extremely authoritarian capitalist state.
>China isn't communist. It is ex-communist.

State capitalism isn't a real thing though, it's a distraction. Capitalism is private ownership, communism is public ownership. State capitalism means the state (the public) in control of the capital. Essentially, when communism becomes authoritarian, call it 'state capitalism' so it doesn't look bad. As we did with that German politician from the 30s and 40s.

>>95196

The randy Scandi socialism thing is a bit of a myth, in part they're currently more free market than the USA. They did have a very socialist period in the 70s or 80s.

Some of these things are cultural and the overlap is weird. Sweden's response to COVID is more like that of a red-state, but people in Sweden are more compliant and trusting of their government as they're more collective culturally.

Somewhat ironic that this article was posted on the same week that a consortium of doctors and academics decided to try to take down Joe Rogan.

>>95208

>No no no, you see, words mean what they mean when I like what they mean, if nit then they don't.

Ah, well then that settles the issue.