Breaking News Thread

I was meaning more within a country but fully appreciate the difficulty. Is Suella really far removed from MTG?

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Having actually studied this, I don’t remember seeing any suggestions that it was exclusive to the right-wing, so this article puzzled me a lot.

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Yeah, it’s a bit weird. Are they suggesting experts missed the Cold War?

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I’m not fully up to speed on Suella’s positions (my impression is Conservative, but moving in a direction towards Farage), but I would be surprised if she was as extreme, vile, uneducated, and prone to conspiracy theories, as MTG.

Don’t worry. She isn’t, either.

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This.

They would be called socialists.

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It’s an area that is both well reported but largely ignored because of how mundane it feels, but the direct ties between the Conservative party and Republicans has for over a decade now been driven by strategists and money than just Regan-Thatcher era ideological alignment. That means in an era when standard conservative economic arguments have increasingly fallen out of favour, the approach we’ve seen the Republicans take have ended up being adopted by the Conservatives as well, and that results in largely similar outcomes in terms of the sort of people who rise through the ranks

Corbyn wasn’t radical, just incompetent. How else do you take policies that poll well with the public and tank (pun unintended) an election so badly?

I’m not sure I’d consider Braverman particularly radical either, just a pretty shit human being. It’s more the likes of Truss and Kwarteng whom I’d consider pretty radical.

On the left, I’d say anyone who wants state control of all industries to be radical, but thankfully I can’t namecheck any of those loonies off the top of my head.

Similarly in the US, I’d probably say Paul Ryan as an example of the right-wing radicals (even though his reputation has been rehabilitated as one of the “sensible” ones. But even then that’s more like a 5 or 6 whereas the Heritage Foundation crew are off the scale. Perhaps the state governors might get more extreme, but I’m not too familiar with the recent ones. Similarly, I’m not sure I can think of anyone particularly extremist or radical on the left, mainly because any of those are again usually laughed off so they don’t get any airtime.

I’m differentiating here by the way between political philosophies of serious politicians, and just attention-seeking idiots. I consider the likes of Jenrick, Braverman, Greene, and most of the current Republican Party to be the latter.

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To be honest, given what I know of the field of psychology, many are just plain incompetent, but this article is probably written just to argue a point that no one ever argued against nor for.

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Really? I’d expect better from you.

If you can’t see the role the media played in demonising Corbyn after it had been established that his policies were popular with the public, you clearly weren’t paying attention.

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Yes, yes, no, yes. The third point being what makes it particularly appalling.

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Yes and no.

Yes, he was obviously kneecapped by the media, but then again, you don’t respond to media smears by doubling down on things that are obviously weaknesses, e.g. the whole Hamas issue. The Skripal incident was another one which was just nuts. I can understand the reluctance to rush to conclusions, but to say that you’d wait for Russia to investigate and then be willing to conclude something?

Rayner is not far off him politically but so much savvier.

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He achieved his popularity by being seen as being both honest and principled. He would have disenfranchised a lot of younger voters if he had changed tack and kowtowed to the press barons.

I’m referring to the obvious problems that while it was undoubtedly sensationalised by the press, Labour did have problems with individuals expressing antisemitic views and sentiments. I’m not convinced it’s an institutional issue, nor am I convinced it’s not one either. But the larger problem is that you don’t say you are for the many, not the few, while picking and choosing who you wish to defend.

At times it often feels like he’s one of those anti-imperialists who are stuck in the Cold War, unable to realise that Russia is an imperial project at this point. And that defending Palestinians and the Palestinian cause doesn’t mean you have to let yourself be portrayed as a Hamas sympathiser either.

You can call it honest, sticking by his friends and allies, or you can just call it being too incompetent to realise that the principles that he’s sticking by aren’t the principles he claims to espouse. They’re just the roles and stereotypes, not the principles themselves.

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If you are always for the many, or the majority as portrayed by the media, at least, you’d end up trying to defend some pretty indefensible positions.

Besides, it’s impossible to keep all the people happy all the time.

Perhaps, but that’s not the problem here.

I haven’t read the paper itself, but the coverage is not flattering to it. They had to rewrite the survey because they deemed that the threshold from the left-wing authoritarianism scale that Altemeyer did devise was too high. It’s almost as though they tried to water down the scale so it could capture some left-wingers who could be said to be authoritarian (which you’ll inevitably find, it’s just a question of to what degree and in what numbers).

It seems to just be yet another iteration of Haidt’s thesis that all universities are left-wing extremist hotbeds, especially their psychological departments, which is why they churn out such left-wing work.

EDIT: The author of the article is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. No ideological bias at all there I’m sure.

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I remember hearing a lot of this argument at the time from many lefties. The fact of the matter was though that promising people this that and the other , like he was doing , was bound to be popular , but it was also patently impractical and widely disbelieved , and hence his subsequent thumping at the ballot box.

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I’d say yes and no. I think we can see it in the differences between 2017 and 2019. I’d argue that in 2019, Brexit and the supposed antisemitism scandal were far bigger factors than the actual policies of the Labour Party.

How Britain voted and why: My 2019 general election post-vote poll - Lord Ashcroft Polls – famously left-wing Lord Ashcroft here.

And? Like, how’s that comparable? In case you missed this classic…

Mosfilm (1985). You know Russian. Meanwhile the other day; Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejna states re: EU/NATO “We believe that the issue of Christian burial of people who were killed in an inhumane manner, and there are about 100 thousand of them, is a fundamental issue between Ukraine and Poland”… You know, Volyn…