love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

I mean, I'm completely in favour of people spontaneously arranging to just go out for one or two big shops per week and that's it, but any attempt to police it without something even further than France's form, will just turn into power-mad cops like this. Would be willing to put a tenner on the skin-colour of the household, too.

'returning from parties' is also a head-scratcher - how do you prove that if you don't know there's a party on, and if you know that, why not just break up the party?

"The boys at the lab have determined that there's two different shades of lipstick on your face - we have a special cell for you, Johnny Swinger"

lol

In the Tesco by mine the clothing section is upstairs and they've closed the escalators, I think the DVDs, books and games are out of bounds too

Enjoying yourself to be made illegal.

I expect US ILXors will soon be changing their tune if US cops start trying to enforce this nonsense over there.

get the troops out, restore some common sense

I regret to inform you that Alex Sobel is bad now

The second group are petrified at the thought of socialism descending into command and control, authoritarian politics and the state replacing the ownership of the people through a small group - I mean there’s no historical precedent is there. Also bedwetters - nice

— Alex Sobel says stay home (@alexsobel) March 29, 2020

that was coming

"soft left" is such a weasel phrase

Starmer has put up the melt batsignal now. It's safe for you all to come out!

Someone make it stop

.@JamiroquaiHQ with the lockdown vibes. 🎙@DavidBowieReal pic.twitter.com/qGeDqqIE7c

— Defected Records (@DefectedRecords) March 28, 2020

Dumping him was the best day’s work Denise van outen ever did.

I stg sometimes there is nothing I would not do for my king

In dark days of this virus outbreak, I hope people will forgive me just once having a bit of a chuckle over this. Thanks James. @piercepenniless Keep safe everyone & special thank you to all those many, many marvellous people helping and supporting one another & our NHS & Carers https://t.co/Bgd8IhW3D8

— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) March 29, 2020

Rachel fucking Reeves :(

Worse, there’s people drooling over Rishi Sunak ffs

I suspect Reeves is being mooted so whichever centre-right candidate Starmer picks will look like a relief in comparison, but we shall see.

i swear Rishi Sunak sounds like the name of somebody with a Resident Advisor mix and their own boutique house label under their belt

There are workers on construction sites, in warehouses and in call centres who have gone to work this week, putting their health at risk. The government needs to be clear about what is “essential” and “non-essential” work pic.twitter.com/xJuTAsYogj

— Rebecca Long-Bailey (@RLong_Bailey) March 29, 2020

It's at least looking like opposition but nevermind

one of my close friends who is very not-online sent me an RLB piece a few days back saying "this ginger-haired lady is good on the situation, i don't know who she is" which <3 <3 tbh

Ah, the Rondon Leview of Books.

I suspect Reeves is being mooted so whichever centre-right candidate Starmer picks will look like a relief in comparison, but we shall see.

Reeves would be an atrocious signal to send out unless she gets up and publically disowns all that shit she came out with in the Miliband era. I hope you're right in this but I've seen speculation that she's in the running because most of the public don't know who she is - although it's likely to really fuck off a lot of the Labour members who do know.

If nothing else it would signify a highly technocratic Shadow Cabinet at the exact point where real vision is required, and I don't see where that's likely to come from.

there have been rumours/shite-talk of Reeves having a prominent role in a Starmer shad cab since Feb. My take is the votes are in and it's a good time to bury some shit news and the guileless so-called Corbynites who didn't see this cunt coming have all cast their votes now and the damage is done.

She'll almost certainly be in the Shadow Cabinet but I dunno, you'd think he'd have enough in the way of political antennae not to go straight for the 'fuck you' gesture of making her Shadow Chancellor, particularly when less controversial candidates exist.

I think his political antennae will only transmit without receiving from now on.

starmer looking set to take labour back to the golden age of 2010-2015. it's at times like this I regret that ilx's melts are too cowardly and devoid of conviction to post what they think

― ogmor, Sunday, 29 March 2020 13:46 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

underrated post imo

Have to say Left Twitter excelled itself this weekend.

Next Weekend: Stay Safe Be Kind or if not maybe just stay off twitter

— Alex Sobel says stay home (@alexsobel) March 29, 2020

jess phillips will be worried, not only is her next leader capitol blown, now there is a new challenger to her other job as a tedious fucking troll

fuck you boris

Britain’s prime minster, Boris Johnson, has made his second appearance since going into self isolation last week after testing positive for coronavirus, saying in a message posted on Twitter that some 20,000 former NHS staff have returned to help battle the virus.

There was also more evidence of the way which the pandemic is turning recent political orthodoxies on their head, when he stressed “there really is such a thing as society.”

It took a virus wiping out society for Boris to finally see that yes, there really is such a thing as society.

the labour right's calculation is, one way or another, the gains they will make with #nevercorbyn former lab voters, die-hard remainers and the wider centre will outweigh the losses on the left and may help them connect more with some of those midlands marginals and perhaps even some of the invincible green suburbs. so the plan is to take the more left-leaning, generally urban constituencies (and younger voters) for granted on the basis that the vote is already so concentrated there that they could lose a huge proportion and still win, and hope that across marginals generally there are more people into presentability & 6'2'' men looking sharp in suits than into wealth redistribution or any sort of significant economic reform. I honestly don't think any of starmer's supporters have had any productive thinking about the long-term impact this might have on labour. starmer wants to have his cake and eat it ofc, who wouldn't, but he must know he will not keep a significant chunk of the post-2015 busier membership/'momentum types' (some would say this is the point), and the ideal of competent leadership starmer represents for many is a step away from a grassroots, member-led party (notice how much in particular online troll accounts have hammered the labour membership itself), and in favour of giving more control to the PLP and councils. the other assumption/issue is whether a coherent, attractive program can be laid out in this political space that will feel relevant to voters and be able to compete with a more state-intervention-friendly tory party. the fact that this part of the political spectrum has produced very little in terms of positive movements or ideas post 2008 and that there are so few people championing this compromise position that we have to articulate their plans for them is perhaps cause for concern on this front.

I think you're right about that calculation but it also feels pre-baked from December 2019 or before and as a result has been so swamped by recent events that it might as well have been thought up by Hugh Gaitskell. Whether these guys have even cottoned onto that is the big question, Wes Streeting was on some panel last week talking about the dangers of Corbynism-without-Corbyn and you had to wonder if he'd looked out of the window or turned on the TV at any point in the preceding couple of weeks.

I suspect the Starmer plan is to jettison *just enough* of the previous Shadow Cabinet and membership to make it look like a decisive break from the past while keeping key figures like RLB onside in order to claim broad churchism. That's an old trick, even Blair used it to some extent when he kept John Prescott sitting around for the entirety of his tenure. Thing is that roughly the same thing could be accomplished in the public eye by purging a load of antisemites without much being lost.

The Labour right themselves are almost guaranteed not to be satisfied with this approach, there have already been anonymous comments made to journalists about him being more Ed Miliband than the Kinnock figure they really want. Leaving the side that actual Neil Kinnock was for most of the Blair era held up as an example of everything that had gone wrong beforehand.

In reality whoever wins will need to be agile enough to respond to a ridiculous pace of events, Starmer's slipperiness, plus the difficulty of pinning him down, might enable him to do that but it might also lead to a situation where no one outside the Labour Party especially cares what he says or thinks. When the announcement is finally made I can see it being met with a gigantic shrug, similar to when the Tories announced IDS the week after 9/11.

Sorry to interrupt but

BREAKING Dominic Cummings is self isolating at home - he had symptoms over weekend

— Joe Murphy (@JoeMurphyLondon) March 30, 2020

xp the Streetings of the party have no ideas and even less sense, they’ll be bad winners under Starmer when he doesn’t do whatever contradictory shit they say. He should be thankful a load of the old wreckers are gone tbh.

Attributing calculation to these guys is over-generous for the most part, which i think ogmor hinted at. A lot of it is simple reflexive tribal hate/fear. I'm increasingly convinced that Starmer's "slipperiness" is a product of him being without qualities or principles, except maybe in a narrow legalistic sense. The brighter end of the Right should realise they don't need to do very much at the moment. A Starmer win and the reappearance of reactionary scum like Reeves in the shadow cabinet will probably drive off enough off the activist left in despair that the middle-managers *will* de facto control the party for the foreseeable. I don't know what the best response to that situation ought to be, 2020 is giving a pretty thorough kicking to whatever fight people had left in them after the election.

Actually scratch that last bit, the response will be formed by better people than tired old dropouts like me. But it seems to me that the response may be peripheral to the Labour party, we may see/need a new Green/Occupy grassroots movement that does its groundwork away from our useless Parliamentary system.

I can tell you now for free I want nothing to do with the Green Party after their disgraceful 2019 election.

there might only be a few labour members who you cld kick out for antisemitism but there's a much larger number of members who will view all such purges as illegitimate and will fight them all the way. it's not even a q of will, the procedure will be a nightmare for any vast democratic organisation and everyone's already got furious and fallen out over it many times so it wld be v hard for anyone to broach this #sensibly even if they were in the position to do so. been so poor during the current crisis and v disappointed with labour just directing members to existing non-party groups all organised on facebook, lends a lot of weight to the idea that the labour party is not a suitable vehicle for any sort of grassroots organising, doubly so when no election is involved. this whole fantasy of the party being more than an electoral machine - turns out if you want to do those things you're better off using orgs & networks other than existing parties

xp

i mean Green in terms of the importance of an ecological emphasis - the party belongs with everything else in the useless Parliamentary system, really it died the day they got hung up on having a Leader

IDS Tories/Starmer Labour. yep I can see Starmer being just as an unpalatable and irrelevant (wish he was a "quiet man" - that fucking voice!) to a broad cross section of the electorate. I don't think he'll make any gains in the brexity Midlands/Northern constituencies and that will be a failed gambit and he'll just inspire apathy and despair (see his pathetic attempts at being *opposition* thus far) in more metropolitan lefty constituencies, meaning slightly lower turnouts.

You would have to assume that Starmer would be able to drain off enough of the 2019 LibDem vote that he might put Labour back into contention in areas of the South but beyond that I don't think anyone can predict what effect the current crisis will have on seats anywhere, things are just moving too fast right now.

turns out if you want to do those things you're better off using orgs & networks other than existing parties

I suspect the presence of party colours of any kind would be actively offputting to a lot of people who would otherwise want to get involved. Can't really blame them for that tbh.

meanwhile (sorry for digression but it's bothering me) a friend just forwarded a new david icke vid to me -- i watched gloomily so i cd push back against anything really toxic -- and even more gloomily realised that there's nearly nothing *in it* to push back against (for example he carefully doesn't mention aliens or blood-drinking 12 foot lizards, tho tbf i probably will dark lol).

"they planned this to do what they wanted to do anyway, which is put all power in the hands of the 1%" (he doesn't say "the few")
if you mean the virus was manufactured with this in mind i don't think it was, but if you mean that the various evolving responses very much favour the already powerful…
"it's not classic fascism, it's not classic communism, but it is going to be a tyranny, a technocratic tyranny"
me doing fishmouth a bit here w/regard to pushback: no it's not not it's not erm is this impossible i am not going to say no
"they want to destroy small and medium-size business, hand everything over to giant corporations, amazon is a prime example"
not sure who "they" is (i mean i have suspicions but this vid gives no hint, it might just be "the boss class", he's already mentioned the 1%) or that they *knew* they wanted this and could achieve it before a few days ago but POSIWID (as stafford beers wd say): the purpose of the system is what the system does. and peter thiel is built into the system.

the obvious thing missing -- aside from giveaway lizard-talk -- is any hint what we shd be doing to fight back against the thiel-system: icke (it turns out) is by no means trotsky

w/my silliest (but is it) conspiracy hat on, "they" have deployed icke etc as sinister vaccinations against genuine bottom-up political transformation -- bcz the bits you're drawn to ("the very rich are very bad") can be shown in this well produced instance to segue unthinkingly into batshit freemen-of-the-landism (cf also Qanon)

anyway i don't think i've been sent it bcz my friend is fully sold on it (they know me better), more in a "so what do you think of this theory?" and i have to put my non-shitposting hat on to respond carefully (my friend is a volatile mix of as bit small-business brexit-cranky anti-guardian daily-mailish, but very aware of racism as they're british POC, plus flashes of calz-flavoured guillotines-now radicalism)

also a v lovely kind but somewhat isolated person who is currently very angry abt what's happening to the NHS

can't be bothered to make a poll for it but curious what ppl think wld happen if you had another election right now/removed the brexit factor (& corbyn factor i guess, tho that wld be curious too ofc). I think labour wld have to really fuck it not to win back a load of the seats they lost by tiny margins, but don't think starmer will do more than wld have happened anyway.

I suspect the presence of party colours of any kind would be actively offputting to a lot of people who would otherwise want to get involved. Can't really blame them for that tbh.

I mean I obv can blame them and every other ice statue gen x+ liberal. the inability of ppl to get over themselves is totally shameful & a key point re: the generational split

some good discussion this morning but i just wanna chime in and lol at domcum being struck down with the 'rona

w/my silliest (but is it) conspiracy hat on, "they" have deployed icke etc as sinister vaccinations against genuine bottom-up political transformation -- bcz the bits you're drawn to ("the very rich are very bad") can be shown in this well produced instance to segue unthinkingly into batshit freemen-of-the-landism (cf also Qanon)

yeah I think rhetorically this is absolutely true. as ever I think the toilet of social media is instructive here: there's been a lot of work invested in building this archetype of the crank left, somewhat overlapping with the naive/student left, and v much overlapping with the antisemitic left. it's a simple and strong idea and it has v broad utility as something that can be projected onto all sorts of left/labour actions to explain/dismiss them

domcum

if we all keep looking at it eventually we’ll develop herd immunity

herd impurity

some good discussion this morning but i just wanna chime in and lol at domcum being struck down with the 'rona

very much otm

I'm not going to clap for Dom. I'd much rather we had an adequately funded grim reaper.