Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Sun Jul 10, 2016 6:28 pm  

The only thing I have left is watching Mark Blyth videos on Youtube and wishing he was my dad.

[Bullseye]

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Mon Jul 11, 2016 11:26 am  

vbfg wrote:

Eagle sure as hell isn't getting my vote. Neither is Corbyn.

I'm not going to help fund its slow death and accelerating irrelevance either.

That tweet is the future and I'm done.

That sort of sums up where I am.

Like Roy Haggerty I don't mind a lot of the Corbyn-ist policies. I'm not sure what if anything the PLP have against those (except maybe the Trident replacement but that's going to a free vote anyway so no issues there).

My issue is that Labour need a leader that can unite members and the PLP who has broader appeal outside meetings of Labour members. Otherwise you can forget about ever enacting any of those policies and get ready for perpetual Tory government.

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Mon Jul 11, 2016 2:53 pm  

Bullseye wrote:

That sort of sums up where I am.

Like Roy Haggerty I don't mind a lot of the Corbyn-ist policies. I'm not sure what if anything the PLP have against those (except maybe the Trident replacement but that's going to a free vote anyway so no issues there).

My issue is that Labour need a leader that can unite members and the PLP who has broader appeal outside meetings of Labour members. Otherwise you can forget about ever enacting any of those policies and get ready for perpetual Tory government.

Get ready?

We've had perpetual Tory government since 1979 at the very least.

Where have you been?

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 2:57 pm  

Apropos of nothing, the words and phrases currently heading my "if they use these I can ignore them" list.

Corbynista
Blairite
SJW
Zionist
"virtue signalling"

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 4:28 pm  

vbfg wrote:

Apropos of nothing, the words and phrases currently heading my "if they use these I can ignore them" list.

Corbynista
Blairite
SJW
Zionist
"virtue signalling"

SJW??

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 4:31 pm  

Social Justice Warrior. Basically, if you speak up against rape threats in a more public part of a place like Reddit someone at some point will call you that. There was a brief period where you would be a 'cuck', i.e a cuckold, but more recently that has become more a bit of "virtue signalling" by supporters of The Donald.

And now I have to kill myself.

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 5:01 pm  

This is a visualisation of ideological positions from amongst different categories supporters of the two main parties. Here's the source data - it's from the 2015 post-election survey. Remember then that this is about the Ed Milliband flavour of Labour and the membership of that time. The membership has moved left since then. To the left is, naturally, more left wing. To the right more right wing. The vertical dotted line is the mean position of all those associated with the party. Here are the main takeaways from this plot: 1) Members are more ideologically "pure" for both parties than any other grouping 2) Members are ideologically most distant from the voters who get that party in to power, as is again true for both parties. 3) The Tory MPs are further away from their base and more aligned with their voters than Labour is. 4) Labour MPs are still ideologically closer to the people who will elect them to power than any other grouping associated with the party. This is why I voted for Corbyn. The distance between him and a pre-disposed Labour electorate is huge. I knew this when I voted for him, and voted for him anyway because his presence could drag those voters leftward on that plot. That time is passed. It is past passed. Get elected, effect change. That's the shape of the world now. (If anybody knows any PolSci people btw, tell them you know someone who wants them to die. Releasing data in proprietary formats that allow Social Scientists to play at statistics? FFS. Get it in a CSV file and let people choose their own damn tools) edit: Forgot to include the link. I didn't do this plot. (But it was done in R and ggplot2, like how what proper people use, and not the nonsense PolSci people think you ought to spend money on)

This is a visualisation of ideological positions from amongst different categories supporters of the two main parties. Here's the source data - it's from the 2015 post-election survey. Remember then that this is about the Ed Milliband flavour of Labour and the membership of that time. The membership has moved left since then. To the left is, naturally, more left wing. To the right more right wing. The vertical dotted line is the mean position of all those associated with the party. Here are the main takeaways from this plot: 1) Members are more ideologically "pure" for both parties than any other grouping 2) Members are ideologically most distant from the voters who get that party in to power, as is again true for both parties. 3) The Tory MPs are further away from their base and more aligned with their voters than Labour is. 4) Labour MPs are still ideologically closer to the people who will elect them to power than any other grouping associated with the party. This is why I voted for Corbyn. The distance between him and a pre-disposed Labour electorate is huge. I knew this when I voted for him, and voted for him anyway because his presence could drag those voters leftward on that plot. That time is passed. It is past passed. Get elected, effect change. That's the shape of the world now. (If anybody knows any PolSci people btw, tell them you know someone who wants them to die. Releasing data in proprietary formats that allow Social Scientists to play at statistics? FFS. Get it in a CSV file and let people choose their own damn tools) edit: Forgot to include the link. I didn't do this plot. (But it was done in R and ggplot2, like how what proper people use, and not the nonsense PolSci people think you ought to spend money on)

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 11:35 pm  

My vote was up for grabs. If the PLP had put up a decent candidate who espoused anti-Thatcher views, I'd have voted for them.

Not now.

Today's appalling corruption has shocked even me, and I thought I was too cynical to be shocked. Leave aside the stupid briefings demanding Corbyn "control" random nutters in Wallasey, and the dreadful procedural attempts designed only to prevent the members from voting for the man most of them want, the final straw for me was the decision - according to Peston, taken without being tabled on the agenda, and only after several pro-Corbyn voices had left the meeting - to disenfranchise more than 100,000 members. Those are people who joined up, of their own accord, and were told when joining that they were welcome in the party and could vote in leadership elections. To then disenfranchise them retrospectively, while opening a brief window for new joiners paying a premium to vote instead, is absolute banana-republic corruption. It's the sort of thing we'd laugh at in 1970s Third World dictatorships. It's disgusting.

I voted Corbyn last year because I wanted, like you, to shift that Overton window. But also because I felt too many of the Labour professional class of MPs and staffers had lost touch with the reason why they were in Labour, rather than the Tories. What has transpired today suggests that it is worse than that. They've lost touch with decency, fairness, even any sense of what democracy actually is. And they are so self-absorbed in their little bubble that they don't seem to realise what this actually looks like outside it.

I think they're mad, undemocratic and completely immoral. I'll fight for Corbyn to win again, and then I'll fight to deselect those who don't quite of their own volition.

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Tue Jul 12, 2016 11:41 pm  

Yep, shoddy as hell. I can't disagree with any of that. The unity candidate I wanted does not exist, and in this atmosphere probably cannot. What little hope I have at this point is actually centred on a romp home for Corbyn. In this atmosphere after some of the events of today I can't deny that's going to play well.

Honestly though, my most firmly held belief is that they party is completely screwed right now.

Re: Will Labour Ever Learn? : Wed Jul 13, 2016 1:51 pm  

I didn't vote for Corbyn and I disagree with him on several issues such as Trident, NATO and other things but I shall be voting for him now. It's been a nasty, dirty attempt at subverting the democratic will of the party. It's been 9 months and there has been virtually no support for him from the minute he was elected, for which the vast majority of the PLP should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

They created this mess and they now have the nerve to try and paint it as Corbyn's doing and have now resorted to personal attacks on Corbyn himself.

Again I find myself agreeing with Roy. There's obviously a large section of the PLP who are either closet Tories or are merely utterly self-interested.