The Woke thread AKA Liberal Kaynesplaining

The "purge" in question was the Tories doing a "Fuck off out of our party if you're not pro-Brexit" one.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a party "get on with fixing things" during my lifetime. I guess the closest would be New Labour before they got utterly fixated on "being party of law and order" and decided that they need to kick that up a notch to being the party of the total surveillance state (to the point where people working for the council could literally order wiretaps, back before RIP got reformed, and that wasn't a mistake, that was Working As Intended), ASBOs, mandatory biometric identity cards, and so on.

We didn't actually disagree re: "broad church", just whether the Tories were ideological or not. I'd say the current lot are, and that they succeeded because that wasn't actually evident to the public during the 2019 election, and Corbyn looked like a real nutcase.

I think we're kind of getting into UK politics rather than Woke though at this point.

They purged the MPs. They didn’t need to do anything about the voter base because the vote base were almost entirely pro-Brexit. You are conflating two completely different things.

And, just to let you know, the Labour Party can be criticised on its own merits without whatabouting the tories.

I am?

I didn't even bring up the purge. Chopsen did (IIRC). So I'm not really sure how I'm conflating anything. I was just pointing out to you that that was the "purge" being referred to in the posts you skimmed.

Equally confused re: "whatabouting" accusation. I've literally never seen any party, in my lifetime, "get on with fixing things". Not Tories, not New Labour, not Tory/LD combo, and definitely not recent Tories. I'm just scarred for life by the whole "Wait, let's turn law & order up to 11!" thing New Labour did. It was creepy AF.

Also if I'm "whatabouting the Tories" does that mean I'm saying bad things the Tories did or bad things Labour did? Not a rhetorical question lol I genuinely don't know.

Generally, if a party was so ideologically driven you wouldn't expect them to do so many u-turns the minute it looks like their stance might damage their popularity. Hell, they've reverse ferreted out of positions while there was someone on air sent out to defend their position still being interviewed.

I mean, wouldn't you?

I guess that's a question.

So from my perspective here's what I see:

1) Tories come up with really extreme and demented laws to be voted on, laws which are largely ideological, and where basic considerations of practicality or reasonableness or fairness have not been considered.

2) Said suggested laws prove unpopular with the public, and more importantly, the remaining non-nutcase Tories (which is like 30-40% of the MPs), who are required to pass them.

3) Tory High Command insists they will go ahead anyway, makes very aggressive public statements.

4) Rebellion brews among non-insane Tories.

5) BoJo finds out and starts panicking. Grant Shapps or [insert any brown or black Tory] is shock-prodded on to TV tell us how great the ideas are, and how they're definitely not going to do a U-turn again this time.

6) BoJo and chums do the math and find they are either definitely going to lose, or will have a pathetic, embarrassing victory even the BBC can't spin as awesome and then likely actually lose the next time they have to vote on it.

7) U-turn because they're fucked if they don't.

Part of the current Tory ideology is "retain power at ALL COSTS", that means U-turning sometimes, that means gerrymandering other times, that means voter suppression, that means obvious vote-buying attempts other times, but none of that is going to mean jack if they can't get enough stuff in place that they are immune to losing elections in future, and there's going to be at least one election before it's all in place. So "retain power at ALL COSTS" kicks in and causes U-turns.

If the government had done zero U-turns we'd have been a vote of no confidence in Boris and/or a general election by now.

I guess another way to put it is that being a bunch of cowardly, stupid and incompetent ideologues doesn't make you not ideologues.

A third way is that the Tories are a weird amalgam party right now, with a bunch of trad conservatives (out of favour), a bunch of chancers with little ideology beyond "grab what you can" (including BoJo), and a significant subset of hard-right nutcases, many of them cabinet members, who are certainly ideologues, but many of whom are so outright stupid that it's hard for them to present any kind of consistent ideology (Dorries springs to mind - the woman is genuinely thick as pigshit but has really extreme views - Patel is a bit smarter but not intelligent or sane and likewise has extreme views).

TL;DR

But seriously, I don't care that much about the tl;dr stuff, I just don't usually read it.

But I agree that you're being a bit needlessly confrontational, in a "excuse me, I must go! someone is wrong on the internet!" kind of way. Like you could make the same points with about 50% less of the heat, and people would (probably) react to it a bit more favourably.

Twitter to get woke?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/29/twitter-chief-executive-jack-dorsey

Reads like a puff piece. Feel a bit sick

New twitter bloke ought to sort out the interface design chunder before he goes for more minor things like transphobia, misogyny, racism, world peace etc. Unuseable.

As someone pointed out, his farewell tweet was basically unreadable on mobile which does illustrate how overdue him leaving probably is

I'm drunk and watching cartoons on a Monday night because my job doesn’t have a job description yet and any sort of engagement with the real world might tip me over. Fucking yay.

Wrong thread. Sorry.

I dunno, incumbents generally have an advantage, and usually get re-elected. Trump didn't, but that's because he was extraordinarily unpopular. Biden isn't particularly popular either, but he hasn't plumbed nearly the same depths as Trump did.

Trump would definitely get the Republican nomination if he wanted it, though. Everyone else is too scared of him.