EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Done, lets leave the little weasel to rant at the walls of his own asylum.

Please use the ignore function everyone

Thanks

As someone who is partial to a spot of trolling on here

I loled

Ok, will do. Will you listen to the Klein & Harris podcast if you’ve not already? Klein doesn’t do well.

If they are pro-capitalist, then there views and agenda might reflect that. Works both ways surely as those that seek social justice?

Nobody is in the pocket of Big Justice. Follow the money.

If only we still had rep...

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The weather's shocking today. I blame Corbyn.

Many people are still living in squalor due to capitalism.

Corbyn has done a fucking number on the weather though, the prick.

newsflash: Billions of people are living in squalor because of capitalism.

Many people are still living in squalor due to capitalism.

You misspelled "Corbyn"

What the world needs is more bespoke chip forks and top caps. That's really going to answer all our problems, not least the climate crisis.

I think our difference of opinion is really over the extent to which people misuse identity politics for bad or dishonest reasons... I'd imagine you say it happens more often than not - in which case we just disagree about frequency.

I think that's further than I'd go and I certainly wouldn't suggest that it is done deliberately (except in a very small minority of cases). With regard to identity politics there are some standard concerns that people express about the need to balance the value of considering each person's/groups unique experience with the need to speak to a universal experience that will (hopefully) become more relevant as sources of injustice are dealt with.

My concern is, therefore, partly about the impacts of such approaches and partly about their provability. I think people adopt viewpoints/lenses/theories in this arena because they appeal to them or seem true to them based on their own experience. That's true for the bullshit "white men are the most oppressed group today" as it is for identity politics, patriarchy theory, intersectionality etc. Obviously some of those theories have a greater degree of supporting evidence than others, but I think they all fall short of the kind of bulletproof evidential support that relativity has.

The problem comes when people become invested in those models (because they resonate with them). That leads them to push them as a cast-iron "truth" and universal explanation for all possible societal phenomena. That in turn leads to confirmation bias, your example of amplifying women in meetings is a reasonable example. Have you noticed that particular men are also constantly interrupted? Their experience is not negated because it falls outside of the model, but it's not something that you address with your amplification. It also leads to reasonable criticisms of the model being dismissed either because those defending it are used to seeing completely unreasonable alt-right attacks and lump reasonable criticism in with it or because the means for dismissing criticism are inherently built into the model (which makes me really fucking suspicious). For example your article on Sam Harris essentially counters his claim to be outside tribalism by saying "well that's exactly what someone of your tribe would say". With regard to identity politics I think that brings us to your point...

Without an understanding of how someone else's reality FEELS to them, you can't really have a polite conversation with them about the analysis.

...which is true, but sometimes gets flipped to be "you can't understand the theory/can't criticise the theory, because you don't know how the manifestations of that theory FEEL in real life" i.e., you lack the relevant experience. That's really concerning because it ignores the need for theories to be genuinely evidentially supported and go beyond personal experience to be broadly accepted and applicable to policy etc.

Ok, will do. Will you listen to the Klein & Harris podcast if you’ve not already? Klein doesn’t do well.

I listened to it at the time and I thought he wiped the floor with Harris. No accounting for taste I suppose.

The thing that moved many Brits out of squalor was the welfare state (including free grants for further education) built after the war. Amongst other things, that dramatically upskilled the workforce, enabling an unprecedented growth period. Sadly, the last four decades have mostly been dominated by delusional nationalists who believe that the prosperity that followed WWII emerged from natural Britishness (when all the historical evidence of life before WWII shows it really fucking wasn't). So they've been happily selling of the things that fuelled that growth, while deskilling and disenfranchising the workforce.

Responsible capitalism was a part of the growth. Now disaster capitalism is all we're left with, dressed up in the stolen valour of Dunkirk by self-interested sociopaths like Johnson and Farage.

I don't actually disagree with much of what you said there - and I agree that identity politics isn't enough on its own to get to an understanding of the truth. Those who think it is are missing something important. But I do think it's a valid part of the conversation. I don't see identity politics as being about objective truth, it's more about how we discuss questions of truth - a matter of recognising that some people face more discrimination than others, and we should recognise it - more a matter of tone if you like. And of course there'll be people who fall outside the model, but that doesn't invalidate the model, it just means the model needs some more detail. To give you an example, I DO notice that some men tend to get interrupted more than others - they tend to be neurodivergent, or nervous, or what have you, and I do my best to compensate for that too. To me what peopel tend to call identity politics is just recognition of the fact that a conversation doesn't happen in isolation, it happens in a context of power, and responding to that context in a balancing way (rather than an exploitative way) tends to result in a more productive conversation.

No one disagrees with this. Even Marx celebrates the benefits capitalism brought to the world. That doesn't mean we should leave behind the people who it has failed to lift, or allow it to run unchecked when it causes more harm than good.

Totally, but how are you going to go about "those that have been left behind?"

Taxation and socialism?

Yes. Exactly that. Taxes and redistribution of wealth.

R/selfawarewolves

Please stop playing in to his hands. You're basically drug dealers giving it out for free so the junkie can then shit on your floor.

Socialism has a track record so poor it's impossible to ignore or evade it.

Are you talking about actual socialism or some bullshit alt-right definition of socialism that includes: any taxation, any nationalisation, public anything, and general cooperation?

^^ I think I'm missing the backstory to this character so seem to be less bothered by their purposefully naive posts than others. But I'll drop it.

Stop projecting.

Keep yomping.