"We've bought a plot of worthless land for buttons in the middle of nowhere and are now trying to convince everyone its going to be The New Cambridge so that we can flog it for millions to a coalition of the gullible"

This is one of those where its genuinely crazy to actively believe it was a false flag based on current evidence, but equally, would anyone really be that surprised if in a decade's time, it turns out that's exactly what happened? Stuff like this turns out to be true surprisingly frequently.

I wouldn't even describe myself as "left" - "progressive" maybe - but this Labour gov are - currently - too right wing for me.

You can probably divide the PLP into those who would have made exactly those same morally atrocious decisions or possibly worse, like Mahmood or Streeting, and those that I'm reasonably confident wouldn't have, like Milliband or Rayner.

What a complete load of drivel that article is

There's an implicit assumption here that there is an overlap between "ideas that are of sufficient merit to warrant serious academic discussion" and "ideas that offend woke people" that *I just don't think actually exists*, and I think people that say this stuff are basically telling on themselves

You and I must have very different payoffs between the cost of spending an extra hour sitting in the airport Wetherspoons vs the cost of buying a replacement flight, rearranging all my onward travel plans, missing a chunk of my holiday, and spending potentially many additional hours in an airport

There's still a lot of people at the heart of labour who think only smart people can become rich, so all rich people must be very smart, and so they're the only people worth listening to

and what a genuinely great and provocative and challenging line that is

The band sometimes express a bit of regret about that song now but personally I think it still holds up as a left wing critique of performative progressivism

Every song is a combination of banging lines and eh lines and everything in-between

I do think its funny how the same failed voices with the same failed ideas keep cropping up, with only the colour scheme and branding changed to match the governing party

I'll have "questions to which the answer is no" for 10 points please bob

normally the purpose of contributing to internet debates its to test one's own ideas, and to make useful contributions for a wider audience to read and build on

Excellent retort 10/10

The only claim that's stupider and more damaging than the claim that everything was better in the past is the claim that nothing could ever have been better in the past and that people's memories of their own lives must simply be a collective false consciousness

Generally it was right-wing economic policies. Every decade has its pros and its cons, and I think we have an inbuilt bias to assume things only ever get better, which is why nostalgia like this is a healthy reality check - things weren't all bad in the past, maybe we should bring some things back!

How do you justify dismissing nostalgia as "false"?

Answer seems to be nooo (correctly)

This is where we've got to so far:
Person A makes a series of points
Person B "all of this is nonsense"
Person C (me) "actually some of it is true"
Person B "you're claiming its all true"
Person C (me) "no, just some of it"
Person B "well I say its all false and <ad hominem attacks>"

Well if you scroll up you'll see that what happened was that I pointed out that *some* of these type of nostalgia points are actually valid, and was immediately dismissed as a "motte-and-bailey" defence of *all* nostalgia. So your analogy is accurate, you're just replying to the wrong person

Maybe it wasn't clear - by "in traffic" I meant stationary traffic

"as he drove along"

So many "economists" seem to confuse "collective demand is the feedback mechanism that tells us what combination of things to collectively create" with "the more an individual demands, the more creation they are responsible for"

Isn't this combination of responses just a direct readout of Galbraith's "private affluence, public squalor". I can't believe any economist could be confused by it.

Reading a physical book whilst in traffic is completely legal, but reading the same book on a Kindle will get you a £1,000 fine. Pretty much the definition of "inconsistent and illogical"

They just need him to hang on until the local elections next month so the new leader isn't tarnished by the inevitably disastrous performance. Then he is free to resign the very next day

You're talking about looking away from the road for more than a second whilst the vehicle is in motion

because the law is illogical and inconsistent, and so people ignore it, as they do to every illogical and inconsistent law, and making punishments increasingly disproportionate will not solve this problem

and people who bring CDs in cars will change CDs, and who bring sandwiches in cars will eat sandwiches, and who bring hand lotion in cars will apply hand lotion, ALL of which are at least as dangerous as looking at a phone, so you think we should ban all of those things too?