Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

if immigration is problematised in terms of they are simply concerned about pressures on GP surgeries or schools, or how once familiar town centres are changing, or whether they’ll be able to compete with migrant workers to get a job.

1. that's not an immigration problem
2. sorry
3. sorry that's not an immigration problem

is that a no?

immigration obv causes some problems, in that local authorities faced with an introduction of significant immigrant population will need resources they perhaps hadn't accounted for - both in terms of sudden increase of population not provided for plus extra things like translators etc. - and in intercommunal strife between immigrant groups and longer standing residents.

the problem is these logistical problems are never presented as what they are, which is just "problems" and not Armageddon, and immigration is constantly posited as a Malthusian thing ("we're full"), or clash of civilizations/attack on native white culture and way of life.

altho obv that positing is most often done sotto voce or thru dog whistles

if the immigration rate put the uk population growth rate in the top 20 or so I think it would be a problem, but as it is many countries are dealing with much larger increases of population and it's not normally a bump of educated working age people

Is there any level of immigration that you guys would find problematic?

I can see there would be practical difficulties with accommodating an infinite number of people, but from an ideological POV: no

Actually let me rephrase that: fuck off, no

cool

It's just that the right keeps claiming that these people cause problems - and they cause problems because people reject them. So what is the issue? Is it people coming into the country or the reaction within the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/17/mainstream-politicians-clueless-on-how-to-deal-with-migration-debate-says-jo-coxs-husband

This is quite good, Guardian article quoting Brendan Cox

Britain First group photo purportedly including Thomas Mair:

https://twitter.com/Elliot_Eastwick/status/743876605832011777

I thought that had been debunked already

i did not know that, but yes, lack of verification is why i said purportedly

https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/743729155469041664

not a brony account, unfortunately

I thought that had been debunked already

could you point me to the debunking CS? this is the original tweet sharing the photo and there's a repeated claim that the ID has been verified by two ex BF members:

https://twitter.com/Far_Right_Watch/status/743870797844971520

It seems credible and that is in front of Dewsbury Town Hall. That pic pretty much sums up how farcical various attempts by right wing groups to get things kicking off in Dewsbury have been for the last decade. The last EDF one was a complete flop as well.

nick i cant because i saw it on a friend of a friends fb thread. Of course the debunking could be fake. Im sure the truth will out soon enough

seeing lots of people say it is him now.

I have said many disparaging things about her in the past year. I am still horrified at what happened yesterday, but despite her being a nice person I was never impressed with her as a politician. She was a standard Blairite and what happened yesterday doesn't change that one iota. I have been having this argument with someone today and apparently my attitude is unacceptable so I will stfu.

― calzino, Friday, June 17, 2016 5:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, your attitude is unacceptable. If within 24 hours after someone's death, a brutal political murder, you are mostly concerned by trying to convince the world that she wasn't good at her job, something is wrong with you. "A human being was slaughtered BUT LETS NOT FORGET SHE WAS SHITE AT HER JOB, DUNNA CHANGE AN IOTA".

Yeah, good on you mate. Such brave a statement. You need to keep your morality in check. And do so while, indeed, shutting the fuck up. For shame.

Listen here you fucking tin-eared moron! i'll comment as much as I like about what happens in my area and I didn't say anything like what is represented in your bullshit post. You go check your own morality you sad sack of shit.

Q.E.D.

calzino if you look upthread you'll see me making a massive clown of myself and I urge you to do as much as you can to avoid being my successor. You've a good community of people here on ilx and if you fall out with everyone and go charging roughshod across the unspoken standards we have here ilx won't be a resource you can use for discussion

Everyone itt agrees that there are problems with 'blairites' but surely you would agree that in perspective considering what's happened here these problems with jo cox and her position re: corbyn are sort of just accepted and not needing to be gone on about? Like I'm pretty sure corbyn himself accepts that, no?

is there any level of immigration that you guys would find problematic?

You people who say there aren't red-eyed pterodactyls plucking people from the streets of trumpington, let me ask you this, is there any level of red-eyed pterodactyl plucking you would find problematic, etc

Everyone itt agrees that there are problems with 'blairites' but surely you would agree that in perspective considering what's happened here these problems with jo cox and her position re: corbyn are sort of just accepted and not needing to be gone on about? Like I'm pretty sure corbyn himself accepts that, no?

no-one is "going on" about this aside from you and LBI?

Dunno? Possibly

calzino isn't the first person I've encountered today who's been trying to make an intervention to make sure people remember that jo cox was actually not so good because she was not quite as far to the left as we would have liked

I can see the angle but jeez get some perspective and I say this as someone who has often needed to get some perspective

Like there's a danger we're all going to become 'blairites' or whatever now? And a stand must be made against all this 'sanctimony'? Like that's more important than challenging the attempts to de-politicise this that all the top scum are up to right now? I dunno, calzino might not have meant that and I can't speak for them

I met Jo Cox once, during her Oxfam days in an Oxfam charity shop, when I lived in Yorks. I was flipping through the crates stacked with useless yet overpriced lp's and at one point, after she was done chatting with personnel etc she joined me going through the lp's. I didn't know who she was, but she joined in. We had a banter and laughed at how silly the cover of the Band On The Run lp is (it really is silly tbh).

That was it. We weren't friends, we didn't bond (other than shared giggles over that stupid record). Just that one moment. But moments like that are exactly what make you see that at the end of the day, this was a human being, a mother, a person. Years later she became an mp and I thought: good for you.

You, "Calzino", are dehumanizing her by focusing on her political beliefs - that you obviously don't care for - and reducing her to merely that. Her beliefs may or may not be what you - or I - believe in. But seriously, why be such a huge prick within 24 hours after Cox was murdered, and reduce a person to her political beliefs? Why?

One shouldn't need to have interacted with a murdered politician to understand she was like you and me. I don't pride myself bringing up the anecdote, but I do it because you seem so out of whack and adamant to spit on someone's grave. For what? Because she was with Labour? That's it? If you want to make a big song and dance about how she was a "Blairite" and opposed Corbyn, go ahead, make a fool of yourself but now is not the fucking time. A caring person, a mother - whether someone from your constituency or not, from your political views or not - was murdered. Instead of trying to demonize a murdered woman, the taking your inability - along with your juvenile cursing - elsewhere.

*"the taking" (which sounds like a terrible movie) = take

I don't think what calzino said here was any kind of attack. He was commenting on a state of affairs, quite calmly and sadly I thought. A few of us, just as much as him, have been suggesting that the social anomie that frames this murder is not the legacy of one particular political party - in fact that a lot of politicians of all stripes have contributed to a climate of public intolerance fueled by a social structure collapsing along faultlines of poverty and alienation.

Last night I watched people argue repeatedly that the problem is politicians being too mean to each other, that we need a climate of mutual respect. Irrespective of whether political policies respect people or have real devastating consequences in their lives. It's pointless to pretend that this brutal murder, probably committed by a mentally ill man with a long history of being a would-be nazi thug, is not going to be nailed to a host of political agendas. It's already happening, these are the games career pols play, they can't help themselves.

So unless you're bellowing abuse at this woman's bereaved family, or painting some extreme slanderous conspiracy about her because you're a nazi fantasist, I think it's ok in a space like this to calmly opine about what happened and why. Which is all I've seen anybody doing, including calzino.

The argument that people are too mean to politicians seems more prevalent than the idea that politicians are too mean to each other. Putting the blame for a toxic culture on voters rather than politicians and the press seems grotesquely offensive tbh. They haven't been idly pandering to the base instincts of Real England, they've actively been pressing these buttons as a way of scapegoating immigrants and the poor for the failures of policy and ideology.

That said, despite abstaining on benefit cuts and the 'why I knifed Corbyn' email, Cox would be a long way down the list of the culpable and showed a hell of a lot more bravery in speaking up than the majority of her colleagues.

no question.

Last night I watched people argue repeatedly that the problem is politicians being too mean to each other, that we need a climate of mutual respect. Irrespective of whether political policies respect people or have real devastating consequences in their lives. It's pointless to pretend that this brutal murder, probably committed by a mentally ill man with a long history of being a would-be nazi thug, is not going to be nailed to a host of political agendas. It's already happening, these are the games career pols play, they can't help themselves.

this kinda gets at how i've been thinking about this murder, and i guess many of the recent murders. as much as murders, like anything else, are a product of the society in which they happen, i feel like they p much instantly become political footballs on social media. and that the fight to own "why" it happened becomes very specific and circular. like before the people are even cold in the grave people are arguing that the cause of the murder was something they already believed to be the state of affairs prior to the murder. like the tone is "now you will see what i have been saying, this murder proves it".

it feels kind of strange and perverse. like my memory from childhood or my teens was that when there was a shooting or a murder, a lot of the discourse was the right blaming music or videogames or movies, and the left ridiculing this and saying the person had a mental illness and as such was not evil nor was doom 3d responsible for one act of violence. (and btw there's nothing stigmatising about saying someone had a history of mental illness, i've seen other left-leaning people acting as if it's offensive to say that a murderer had a mental illness. it's not, the more we speak about mental illness the better.)

now it seems like a lot of the left are focused on ridiculing the "he had a mental illness" thing, for every murder. i guess this is in favour of highlighting the hate crime behind a given act of violence, and fine, someone needs to tell both the media and some of the people attacking it that it's possible to have a mental illness and be a bigot.

but a lot of the reactions to murders ultimately feel p traditionally right wing to me - like trying to further vilify a killer by screaming that they weren't mentally ill, that they weren't a loner (even if this is a cliche, isolation is a real problem). i don't really get the end point of this rhetoric, but i don't like where it seems to go. it reminds me of john major's "understand a little less" speech. it seems to allow for more callous treatment of perpetrators. even as i type this i can imagine someone saying "but what about the victims" - again, the kind of argument i can remember having with people who support the death penalty.

to me it seems someone who murders many people must by necessity have severe problems. they deserve sympathy. even if their views are horrible to me.

lastly - i'm seeing a lot of blame on twitter for the tabloids after jo cox's death. as much as i'd like to have a reason to lambast the mail or whatever, i think it's p hard to apportion blame like this. again, it feels like blaming violent movies, or marilyn manson, or videogames. you can prob blame the tabloids in part for the fact that some people have prejudiced views based on incorrect information, but in a liberal democracy this is almost inevitable. i mean you might as well blame the internet - i don't see anyone doing that. nobody is tweeting every day about how many wrong, stupid and hateful articles they find in dark corners of the internet, unlike people do with the daily mail, helping it to be the most popular news site in the world. if the tabloids were creating murderers or fuelling a culture of violence we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

i just think the questions about violence (and the rise of far right groups) are bigger than the answers we tend to come up with. like as a society we are far less violent than ever (again this week some of the "oh what an awful time to be alive" shit on twitter is laughable, we've been alive for longer than 30 years as a species). murders are probably less frequent than ever too. but our reaction to things still seems to be to try and amplify some particular point of view.

in the aftermath of these high-profile murders, i often think that if the killer had got apprehended on the way to do what he was doing, a few hundred thousand fervently argued hard "truths" would all disappear in a puff of smoke.

great post

The internet, or at least it's darker corners, is qualitatively different from the role the papers play in society though - you have to go seek it out, it's not something that you'll see around forming the fabric of culture. "Did you see that thing in Breitbart?" and "Did you see that thing in the Daily Mail?" are very different questions.

in the aftermath of these high-profile murders, i often think that if the killer had got apprehended on the way to do what he was doing, a few hundred thousand fervently argued hard "truths" would all disappear in a puff of smoke.

You've lost me - what kind of "truths"?

will add that the o tempora o mores despair is certainly provoked by transatlantic political brinkmanships coming to a head more or less simultaneously, and that things ought to simmer down a bit soon

and that this was an expressly political murder so it is easier to say that he thought he was doing the bidding of higher powers than people who may or may not have been inspired directly by marilyn manson

but obviously he was mentally ill. tt told me yesterday that it's incredibly dangerous to ignore this fact, just as it's dangerous to stigmatise mental illness

You've lost me - what kind of "truths"?

p much any strongly-argued reaction to the event.

and that this was an expressly political murder so it is easier to say that he thought he was doing the bidding of higher powers than people who may or may not have been inspired directly by marilyn manson

but obviously he was mentally ill. tt told me yesterday that it's incredibly dangerous to ignore this fact, just as it's dangerous to stigmatise mental illness

i agree - i think both the mental illness and the political views need to be taken into account - feel like one of these is often diminished depending on the end goal of the person arguing.

shadow cabinet minister (forget his name) on Newsnight last night talking about the rise in threats against MPs and especially against women MPs and especially on social media - all very true, all very much bad and something to be tackled - and there was talk about how this went up after the Bomb Syria vote, people saying horrible threatening to MPs online, but there's the elephant in the interview and i'm thinking "well you were voting to have people actually irl killed, handwring it however you want to"

if the tabloids were creating murderers or fuelling a culture of violence we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

We are literally seeing a lot more of it. Reported hate crimes against people seen as 'migrants' are rising, unreported hate crimes are thought to be rising even faster.

yeah that is definitely the part of that post that requires more interrogation, think LG is demanding some properly holistic systems thinking of the british people though and this won't happen overnight

xpost i was talking about murder, but i didn't know that about hate crimes against perceived migrants - i guess i'd still find it hard to entirely blame the tabloid news though.

The internet, or at least it's darker corners, is qualitatively different from the role the papers play in society though - you have to go seek it out,

don't think this is true - i see horrible right wing conspiracy stuff in my facebook feed p frequently, and i don't want to see it. in my case, it's friends ridiculing it, but it still shows they're finding it p easily as well. personally i would say the internet, and particularly social media, and even more particularly twitter, have quite easily deepened my interests in the things i'm interested in, which happen to be books/sport/clothes/going out for dinner rather than violent racism.

anecdotal now, but does everyone here have like one or two friends who have posted weirder and weirder conspiracy theory stuff on facebook over time? i know i do. like old school acquaintances or whatever that i eventually unfollowed.

i'm not saying ban the internet, just think it gets ignored a lot when we talk about the role of "the media" in these kind of events, in a world where many people's direct experience of the news is more likely to be in a facebook or twitter feed. no idea if this is true for mair, but equally i've no idea if he read the daily mail, nor presumably does anyone else.

also - if the environment is so poisonous, why isn't everyone affected by it? like people itt are able to say "this poisonous thing is happening" - why aren't those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion? what makes this media environment affect one person and not another?

sorry, i meant why are those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion...

NV v otm - plenty of space for angry disagreement when your local MP is voting for bombing people/benefit cuts etc.

Calzino has been reasonable - not seeing the fuss.

http://i.imgur.com/0aoOnsJ.jpg

This is just the stuff that doesn't make out migrants support terrorism or that refugees are ISIS sleeper agents. Does it have no effect on the public?

Is it really a stretch to link adverts claiming that remaining in the EU will lead to Orlando-style massacres or calling drowning Syrian children 'cockroaches' in the British paper with the largest national circulation to hostility towards 'outsiders' or linking that hostility towards an increase in violence? Lots of people from minority backgrounds are saying this is the most dangerous political environment they can remember since the early 90s, pre-Stephen Lawrence.

The internet has definitely played a part, both in widening access to Neo-Nazi material that you'd probably have had to send off for by mail order, and adding a sheen of legitimacy to far-right outlets like Breitbart, though.

sorry, i meant why are those we feel are being tainted by it unable to make that conclusion..

A lot of people have made that conclusion. It's not organic, it's being deliberately cultivated in an environment of economic hardship. Tell people that their job moving to a zero-hours contract, their failure to get on a housing waiting list or the closure of local council resources is because of immigration and a proportion will believe it.

It's absolutely not just the tabloids, though. It's broadsheets, the internet, politicians here and abroad and a variety of other factors.

An obvious point but a whole lot of the internet *is* the media, be it the bbc website or people talking about articles in the mailor whatever. Facebook isn't a distinct and inseparable societal influence.

Seperable not inseperable

NV v otm - plenty of space for angry disagreement when your local MP is voting for bombing people/benefit cuts etc.

Calzino has been reasonable - not seeing the fuss.

Second the comment about NV, he is totally otm. Also, the criticism of calzino here was way over the top.

Asked his name the defendant in the dock says "My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain."

His first hearing seems to be going well.