BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

Dilbert_X wrote:

But the people keep voting them in.

you talk about 'people' as if they are Adam Smith-era rational individuals who make the best possible choice in an open forum of Enlightenment debate.

the media are bought and sold. the politicians are bought and sold. elite interests predominate.

the 'people' vote for who they are persuaded to vote for. that persuasion is deep and inflects every aspect of society.

in recent years even the art and rhetoric of persuasion seem a lost luxury. now there is so little accountability, thanks to a partisan media sphere and totally unlegislated social media space, to even adhere to the basic criteria of truth and verifiability. people aren't so much persuaded of a political case as stoked full of fears and lies. there's no electoral or legal consequence, no corrective or punitive mechanism available, to telling a bald lie and gaining a vote for it. the british political system and its protocols has operated by 'gentlemen's agreement' for centuries; but we live in a venal and cynical age without gentility.

tabloids and sensationalist media have an outsized place in this; social media contribute their own unique and particular poisons.

follow the big money. 'the people', especially in your much-applauded era of populism, frequently behave irrationally. especially when considering their own class interests. that's because they've been denied the education and analytical skills, purposefully, over generations, to even conceive of their interests on a class basis. isolated and pumped full of lies. all this is by design.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-10 03:05:48)

are you asking me when the last time was we had a government that faced a global pandemic and 18 months of furloughed workers?

i don't think the corruption and high fraudulence of the tory elite is a matter of classics vs. physics undergraduate degrees, dilbert.

please, i honestly implore you, learn how to make a fucking point. do you think johnson's character and ethics were put together by reading Cicero at oxford? you honestly think that is what has influenced his behaviour his whole life? he was an arrogant little shit and a megalomaniac at Eton.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-10 03:09:23)

it's still a fact, for instance, that two of the biggest financial frauds in modern german history were perpetrated by ... a 'caste' of engineers and STEM-background managers in her car industry and financial sector. are engineering degrees, then, de facto a 'corrupting' influence? do better.

forget £100bn: it's still a fact that hundreds of PEOPLE were burned to death in grenfell tower because of shady and dishonest fire-testing practices at ... an engineering firm, involving collusion between engineers, management and clients on a very high level. is engineering therefore a murderous, amoral profession? do better.

as i said, i have provided ample evidence for the current tory party's ideological cast being set by a nexus of think-tanks and lobbying groups. far more influential to the current complexion of the tory party than a plummy oxford professor prescribing reading on the roman republic, dilbert. the current tory party, after may/cameron, have been defined by (a) populism, brexiteerism, and the ERG (steve baker and mark francois, plummy oxford types? lmao they're barely literate); (b) a renewed fealty to trump, anticipating the need for better atlantic ties in new trade deals; and (c) a new battle for the soul of the party between the thatcherite faction (hardly defined as PPE plummy toffs) and the metropolitan cameron-osborne set.

the boris years in particular can be seen as a shameful conjunction of the 'rule by executive degree' emulation of trump's white house and the bringing onboard of dominic cummings, with his machiavellian 'dark arts' approach to big data, privacy invasion, and social media manipulation. dominic cummings was notably anti-humanities, advertised for a 'crack squad' of quants and problem solvers, and wanted to get rid of the humanities 'whitehall mandarins'. the current conservative govt are doing much to dismantle humanities education in universities, dilbert; one of rishi sunak's main proposed policies is to scrap funding for any degree that doesn't lead to immediate wonga after 6 months. this is your 'humanities tory party'?

none of the above really has much to do with PPE at oxford. the degree itself is not an ideology factory, as i said. check the syllabus and reading list.

it's a sad fact that the 'elite' in any sphere in britain still tend to pass through the same 4 private schools and the same 2 ancient universities. but there we are. lots of people study humanities at oxford who aren't Eton-educated princelings who want to run the world for their own vanity. those people are born and created in our archaic class system, itself a cause of the inequality that i and most other humanities-minded people protest about so much. they're not created de novo at balliol college, oxford.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-10 06:01:40)

uziq wrote:

it's still a fact, for instance, that two of the biggest financial frauds in modern german history were perpetrated by ... a 'caste' of engineers and STEM-background managers in her car industry and financial sector. are engineering degrees, then, de facto a 'corrupting' influence? do better.

forget £100bn: it's still a fact that hundreds of PEOPLE were burned to death in grenfell tower because of shady and dishonest fire-testing practices at ... an engineering firm, involving collusion between engineers, management and clients on a very high level. is engineering therefore a murderous, amoral profession? do better.

as i said, i have provided ample evidence for the current tory party's ideological cast being set by a nexus of think-tanks and lobbying groups. far more influential to the current complexion of the tory party than a plummy oxford professor prescribing reading on the roman republic, dilbert. the current tory party, after may/cameron, have been defined by (a) populism, brexiteerism, and the ERG (steve baker and mark francois, plummy oxford types? lmao they're barely literate); (b) a renewed fealty to trump, anticipating the need for better atlantic ties in new trade deals; and (c) a new battle for the soul of the party between the thatcherite faction (hardly defined as PPE plummy toffs) and the metropolitan cameron-osborne set.

the boris years in particular can be seen as a shameful conjunction of the 'rule by executive degree' emulation of trump's white house and the bringing onboard of dominic cummings, with his machiavellian 'dark arts' approach to big data, privacy invasion, and social media manipulation. dominic cummings was notably anti-humanities, advertised for a 'crack squad' of quants and problem solvers, and wanted to get rid of the humanities 'whitehall mandarins'. the current conservative govt are doing much to dismantle humanities education in universities, dilbert; one of rishi sunak's main proposed policies is to scrap funding for any degree that doesn't lead to immediate wonga after 6 months. this is your 'humanities tory party'?

none of the above really has much to do with PPE at oxford. the degree itself is not an ideology factory, as i said. check the syllabus and reading list.

it's a sad fact that the 'elite' in any sphere in britain still tend to pass through the same 4 private schools and the same 2 ancient universities. but there we are. lots of people study humanities at oxford who aren't Eton-educated princelings who want to run the world for their own vanity. those people are born and created in our archaic class system, itself a cause of the inequality that i and most other humanities-minded people protest about so much. they're not created de novo at balliol college, oxford.

it’s amazing, being in my early 30s and encountering another major recession, the first after bailing out the elites in 2008, and now this new compounded issue today.

in the last 10 years we had record and prolonged low interest rates. people could start businesses, take risks; we could have funded massive amounts of new house building and cheap access to mortgages; we could have rolled out large schemes to insulate our existing housing stock; we could have pressed ahead with major investments with green energy, building solar and wind stations, generating many new jobs in the process as part of the economic recovery. all of which would have prepared our economy and populace much better for the fuel and winter shocks that we face now.

instead, the conservatives insisted on a narrow type of austerity that cut the social safety net to shreds and defunded welfarism.

a lost decade in the best-case scenario. but at least a lot of bankers and management consultants had great year-on-year growth.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the … tive-party

ouch. this in the tory house mag.

Afterthoughts, I'm kind of sick of hearing about Ayn Rand at this point. The reverence creeps me out. Even the blurbs on the back of her novels are tiresome. "Triumph in the face of adversity!" Has an 'institute' that talks up sales figures. Copies sold! Success story!

Ayn Rand fan, meanwhile: "Meh, social media is of no import. I don't care if someone is an influencer with millions of subscribers."

uziq wrote:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-crisis-at-the-heart-of-the-modern-conservative-party

ouch. this in the tory house mag.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr … rdon-brown

and there we go, gordon brown enters the fray with eminent good sense.

and his recommendations: windfall taxes on profits, freezing the cap ... and renationalisation. just as i said made sense, rather than suffer this madness.

it's a shame he nearly sunk the treasury during his tenure, but i've already expressed my dissatisfaction with the events of 2008 many times here.

undoubtedly he's an intellectual juggernaut compared to the current tory party.

little to do with it, actually. more the fact we privatised our energy infrastructure from thatcher onwards and systematically failed to plan/stockpile in last 12 months.

we have north sea oil and a relationship with norway over emergency supplies. don’t need to be in the EU to deal with norway.

there are lesser arrangements with france and the EU blocs purchasing behaviour generally that’s driving up prices, but again brexit is minor in the setting of retail energy pricing.

where brexit does hurt is in the fact it’s also plunging the general economy towards recession and is hurting the wallet of the average pleb. it’s undeniably a part of the broader economic stressors.

but in this case the retail prices really are that way because the tories have believed in the market dogma, since thatcher onwards, that ‘private sector is more efficient’. meanwhile there’s a rotating door between these energy companies boards, lobbies, and tory MPs, of course.

as for ‘market efficiency’ and the ‘strengths of capitalism’, now our energy and transport networks are labyrinthine and endlessly convoluted. different private concerns own the power stations, operate the grid, buy wholesale units of energy and sell retail units of energy … we have 6 major ‘suppliers’ and endless subsidiaries they have acquired who are technically buying the wholesale fuel at one price and reporting record profits on the difference, all of whom have received considerable emergency funds during covid/ukraine shocks to keep their retailing afloat. different companies own and are responsible for the railways themselves, the trains that run on them, the thousands of bus suppliers, the dozens of train companies … and of course, they’re not really competing in a market but being endlessly subsidised or bailed out, because they’re ‘too big to fail’. that’s capitalism baby! survival of the fittest

it’s so perverse that british people subsidise the cost of utilities for european citizens. even for the chinese in the case of water. that’s because the major conglomerates that snapped up our energy grid were … companies like EDF and chinese state affiliated concerns. EDF, that is, who are the french energy company who just became 100% state-owned in response to the same crisis.

france has a 4% energy price rise in good part because their UK division is skimming record profits. oh and because they believe the state should have a say in the provision of utilities as a public good, rather than an excuse to make their mates from private school or the golf club stinkingly rich.

but remember: dilbert says renationalisation is too expensive now we’ve banned those generous russian oligarchs. and unions are naughty! you’d have to be insane to consider state ownership or control of prices. capitalism baby

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-10 23:31:43)

uziq wrote:

it's a shame he nearly sunk the treasury during his tenure

Yes, selling off the gold reserve at bargain basement prices so he could stand at the box in parliament drinking whiskey and telling everyone everything was going great wasn't the work of an intelligent man.

Didn't you know that The Fountainhead is known for doing more good for humanity than any medical textbook?

Is Howard Roark dilbert's hero? Has he even read the book? Or is it like when he quoted Heinlein without ever having read a Heinlein novel.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2022-08-11 04:34:03)

uziq wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

ayn rand's books do high numbers in the same way that l. ron hubbard's books do numbers.

Probably better than the stuff you publish I bet.

ah, yes, the numbers argument. can't argue with that, can we?

You're the one who brought in the numbers argument you moron.