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Jeremy Corbyn's time is up

Plumdaff said:
Are there better ways of talking about politics on social media?
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I never really understand these criticisms of "social media".

I don't do FB because I object to the prevention of anonymity - I don't want future employers seeing me discussing my politics or calling Arsenal fans cunts - so I can't comment on that platform.

But my daily experience of twitter is forged entirely around the accounts I choose to follow. These tend to be
  • Spurs players/journalists
  • A few MPs like James Clevery, Luciana Berger, Matt Hancock, Corbyn, Sadiq and David Lammy
  • Some for the lols, like Donald Trump, Far Right Watch and Sun Apologies, and
  • People like Mike Stuchberry, MissDuffy, Johnny Two Hats, Ralf Little, supermathskid, The Daily Beast and Pilgrim Tucker who post interesting stuff, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

So my experience of twitter is formed entirely of those accounts, unless I choose to go ferreting down some trending topic or something.
 
butchersapron said:
What if not internet user and want screeds?
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Nothing against them, and if you look at samizdat or people gathering to hear something read they couldn't themselves always an appetite too, more against the idea there was one way of doing it the internet has spoiled.
 
Corax said:
I never really understand these criticisms of "social media".
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It's quite easy to manipulate social media.

And conversely it's very hard to control it.

With good and bad results - Arab Spring protestors getting round state censors vs man taking a gun to that pizza place in Washington.

For commercial reasons the sites want you to spend as long as possible there, so they prize "engagement" above everything else, and people tend to engage with stuff that stirs strong emotions in them, most often anger. Their algorithms have also tended to push you to more of what you like a little bit of and there are lots of examples of people being taken to quite extreme stuff.

I've seen it myself on YouTube - not quite social, maybe - where I went from taking an interest in buddhist meditation to being offered really strong Islamophobic stuff really quickly. (That sounds weird, but it's true, and the particular reason is Sam Harris, the famous aetheist - and by many accounts islamophobe - who wrote a book on meditation, which I listened to him giving a talk on.)

The other day I watched a video from David Pakman, who's a very centre-left figure (I think he's a Bernie fan) on Jared Kushner giving a speech to a Jewish organisation and being humiliated, after his report the next video cued up was the speech itself, so I thought I'd take a look at that, and the next video after that was a hugely anti-Semitic film about Kushner with 4 million views and loads of comments about the Illuminati.
 
Yeah, sorry, I don't mean manipulation in those cases, but that it was a form of communication that couldn't be controlled by fairly repressive governments.
 
There are lots of positives and lots of negative potentials, I think.

Anonymity is good for activists, again, particularly in repressive states or where employers might act against them, but it's hard to argue that it doesn't also help enable some of the web's worst behaviour - threats, bullying...
 
I have re-started swimming as a hobby. Looked up a few how to you tubes on improved breastroke techniques. Suddenly got my suggestions splattered with "12 year old's swimming" "13 year old swimming" etc etc The way their algorithms work is to feed off obsessives/ perverts/ maniacs.
 
butchersapron said:
It's not innocuous - it's about a model of politics that see w/c people as 'getting their politics' rather than constructing their own politics. That's utterly central. If you just meant many people discuss politics or get their political news from facebook then fine. But the opposite suggestion has to be challenged - after all, it's only an updated version of the idea that the w/c gets fed what to think by the s*n.
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It's funny you mention constructing their own politics because some of the curious reactions to this internet age might be rather influenced by the spectacle of far more people expressing far more thoughts in the form of the typed word. Ooh ooh, unsafe feelings, these oiks havent even been scrubbed through grammar school and oxbridge before getting the privilege of written mass communication!

Anyway it is late and I am not used to using the word milieu. And I'm certainly guilty of going on about narratives way too much. But I'm deeply unimpressed with the way the story of what is happening this century is being told. Take the financial crisis and the way a couple of aspects were zoomed in on to the exclusion of much else, leaving plenty of room for other shit 'explanations' to fester away from this narrow gaze. And sometimes I get pissed off that not enough things are being joined together, too many issues and events looked at in relative isolation. I suppose I might let out a doomed laugh at this point because hideous, sloppy dot joining is one of the things we get at the loons for and some of the dots are often anti-semitic. And on all the occasions over the years where I made fairly dismal attempts to join up issues of energy, global warming and economy, I never got a great sense that this was something that was resonating with many people. Obviously that might just be because I did a shit job of it, but regardless I remain concerned by the lack of attempts to get a bit more cohesion going between related domains. I know its difficult and stories that explain everything all rolled into one are usually well dodgy, and no we dont need any more Adam Curtis-like explanations, but I cant help feeling something is missing on some fundamentally important level.
 
Alternatively, that stuff I was just going on about isnt really the issue, most people broadly know the score, and the main issue is the lack of obvious opportunities to do something about it. Leading some to clutch at straws made of shit and human suffering, whether they realise it or not.
 
butchersapron said:
It's not innocuous - it's about a model of politics that see w/c people as 'getting their politics' rather than constructing their own politics. That's utterly central. If you just meant many people discuss politics or get their political news from facebook then fine. But the opposite suggestion has to be challenged - after all, it's only an updated version of the idea that the w/c gets fed what to think by the s*n.
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I may have missed it, but I didn't see any previous link to this being a phenomenon isolated to the working class.
 
butchersapron said:
Politics? From their real lifes - from every single thing that they need to do to reproduce their life - work, school, health, leisure, housing -each time their world coincides with this it is politics - not facebook.
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the wholesale adoption of identity politics by class struggle anarchsist groups?
 
copliker said:
Am I reading too much into this or is it a little bit blood libel.
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It's a biblical reference so you can take it any way you want.

Exodus 22:29
Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.
 
butchersapron said:
Sounds a bit like with the anti-semites sometimes but the CST and BOD never!

I've generally enjoyed their stuff before - that's shit though. Who are they talking to? Just the people mentioned? Just the labour party?
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Fair enough - I said it was interesting, I didn’t say it was good. ;)

Has lead to this:
 
Fozzie Bear said:
Fair enough - I said it was interesting, I didn’t say it was good. ;)

Has lead to this:
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It is interesting in that they replicate the logic of the groups they try to reject - they essentially say, look we are the experts on anti-semitism, it's up to us to say what it is, when it operates and where. And like the groups they criticise they have their own agenda on which to paint this little picture of them as the natural defenders - for them supporting corbyn, for the others attacking corbyn. Same game with a minus placed where the others place a plus.

That posted above is ridiculous of course and not the way to drain the swamp - and i doubt that was ever the intention of the complainants, this going some distance to justify a good part of the jewdas claims.
 
They're filth.

And why are they still recruiting/asking for money on that tweet? They won the referendum didn't they? I reckon they're going to wait for UKIP to finally go phffft before relaunching a Farageist party of some sort.
 
elbows said:
It's funny you mention constructing their own politics because some of the curious reactions to this internet age might be rather influenced by the spectacle of far more people expressing far more thoughts in the form of the typed word. Ooh ooh, unsafe feelings, these oiks havent even been scrubbed through grammar school and oxbridge before getting the privilege of written mass communication!

Anyway it is late and I am not used to using the word milieu. And I'm certainly guilty of going on about narratives way too much. But I'm deeply unimpressed with the way the story of what is happening this century is being told. Take the financial crisis and the way a couple of aspects were zoomed in on to the exclusion of much else, leaving plenty of room for other shit 'explanations' to fester away from this narrow gaze. And sometimes I get pissed off that not enough things are being joined together, too many issues and events looked at in relative isolation. I suppose I might let out a doomed laugh at this point because hideous, sloppy dot joining is one of the things we get at the loons for and some of the dots are often anti-semitic. And on all the occasions over the years where I made fairly dismal attempts to join up issues of energy, global warming and economy, I never got a great sense that this was something that was resonating with many people. Obviously that might just be because I did a shit job of it, but regardless I remain concerned by the lack of attempts to get a bit more cohesion going between related domains. I know its difficult and stories that explain everything all rolled into one are usually well dodgy, and no we dont need any more Adam Curtis-like explanations, but I cant help feeling something is missing on some fundamentally important level.
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I think that butchers is using 'milieu' in the Colin Campbell sense described here:
... this environment Campbell explains is the cultic milieu. A fertile ground inhabited by a ‘society of seekers’ (127) who share a ‘basic principle of tolerance and eclecticism’ (Ibid), opposing the dominant societal culture and embracing a variety of deviant and heterodoxical approaches to life.

‘Fragmentary tendencies present in the milieu because of the enormous diversity’ (123) of the seeker-ship and therefore cults thrive in abundance. The non-‘exclusivist’ (121) nature of cults subsequently leads them to their demise. The ‘seekers do not…necessarily stop looking in other directions when one path is indicated as the path to the truth,’ (127) instead, a ‘displacement of goals’ occurs and variety of belief causes the collapse of cults.
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Campbell, Colin. The Cult, The Cultic Milieu and Secularization. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, SCM Press London, 1972.

Original here, p12: The Cultic Milieu

One of the things that makes this different to 'the poors are given their politics by the internet' is the active politics-forming process implied by the 'society of seekers' bit, alienated individuals doing something that's fundamentally social and potentially political with a mass of 'stigmatized knowledge' being reproduced within the milieu.

This way of looking at it seems to work pretty well with Stuart Hall and subsequent notions see e.g. Encoding/decoding model of communication - Wikipedia

The thing that's different with the internet seems to me more in 'inhabited' bit of the milieu notion, more in the domain of Complex Network Analysis*: social and semantic networks that contain on the one hand a lot more potential variety than meatspace or paper networks, but on the other hand allow (and even algorithmically amplify) stronger clustering.

* see e.g. the stuff about scale free and small-world networks here: Exploring Complex Networks (PDF)
 
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butchersapron said:
It is interesting in that they replicate the logic of the groups they try to reject - they essentially say, look we are the experts on anti-semitism, it's up to us to say what it is, when it operates and where. And like the groups they criticise they have their own agenda on which to paint this little picture of them as the natural defenders - for them supporting corbyn, for the others attacking corbyn. Same game with a minus placed where the others place a plus.

That posted above is ridiculous of course and not the way to drain the swamp - and i doubt that was ever the intention of the complainants, this going some distance to justify a good part of the jewdas claims.
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Yup, this I think is good on the Jewdas thing being too narrow (and the wider issue not just being about Corbyn and Labour)

In the spirit of Yanovsky and Feigenbaum: against the cranks, against the “community leadership”
 
Fozzie Bear said:
Yup, this I think is good on the Jewdas thing being too narrow (and the wider issue not just being about Corbyn and Labour)

In the spirit of Yanovsky and Feigenbaum: against the cranks, against the “community leadership”
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Yes - v good and exactly what i've been trying to get across about the milieu. This thing is not the property of labour - left or right - or any community leaders. It's a real opportunity for those of us who've spent too long butting heads with these goons to little or no avail so far.
 
Just joining some dots here. One of Mearone's other murals ('Allegory of Complacency') bears a strong resemblance to the cover of Megadeth's 2009 album 'Endgame', even down to the sheeple's stitched heads, the result of some dastardly mind control surgery no doubt. The chemtrails seem a bit overkill. I don't know why the man on the left has three arms. If there had been any freaks in that cave, I'm sure Plato would've mentioned them. Mustaine is of course a considerably deranged conspiraloon.

Mear One » Allegory of Complacency

megadeth endgame.jpg
 
killer b said:
oh dear.

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Luciana Berger is a shit-stirrer par excellence, and has been since her days on the NUS, where she attempted to use her authority to police supposed anti-Semitism at SOAS (in reality, the student union allowed the uni's Islamic Society to use a room free of charge, and the Union of Jewish Students branch at SOAS had a hissy fit), and got herself into a pile of shit because of it. frogwoman also followed the story at the time, and had several laughs about it.
 
killer b said:
I dunno, half the arseholes on that thread are attacking Berger and talking about 'so-called antisemitism'.
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To be fair, Berger is a twat with form for crying wolf about anti-Semitism. I have a problem with that, in that it makes it that much harder to get actual anti-Semitism taken seriously.
 
Some polling of labour members:

On that second point, the first thing to notice is the major shift in the level of support Jeremy Corbyn has among Labour party members. Two years ago this was still a party divided on the leadership and unsure of his future. Now they are solidly behind him. 80% of Labour members think Corbyn is doing well as leader, just 19% badly. 74% of Labour members think that Jeremy Corbyn should lead the party into the next general, and 64% of members think it is likely that Jeremy Corbyn will become Prime Minister in the future.

This is a complete transformation of attitudes since 2016 – back then, Labour members were split on Corbyn’s performance, didn’t think he could ever win, most didn’t want him to fight the next election. Now, following Corbyn’s victory against Owen Smith and the party’s revivial at the election, Corbyn’s support in the party looks absolutely solid.

Looking briefly at two of the other recent decisions Jeremy Corbyn has made, his members also back him over both his handling of the Salisbury poisonings and his sacking of Owen Smith. 69% think that Corbyn has responded well to the poisonings, and by 50% to 37% they think sacking Smith was the right decision.

....

Now, moving on to the anti-semitism row that Labour have found themselves in.

19% of Labour members think that anti-semitism in the party is a serious and genuine problem that needs addressing. A further 47% of Labour members agree that there is a serious and genuine problem, but think that is has been exaggerated for political reasons. Finally, 30% think that there is not a serious problem of anti-semitism at all. Broadly speaking, two-thirds of members think there is a problem (though many of those think it is being exaggerated for political effect), just under a third think there is not.
 
Does anyone rememberthe Channel 4 documentary on Inside the Pro Israel Lobby? If that was to be screened now what would be the reaction?
 
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