Politics Thread!

[Harlequin]

This is a maxed-out deal that we’re going to make bigger.

Is that even supposed to mean anything?

It means that Trump doesn't know what "maxed out" means.
…
Is this, like, one of those "one door always tells the truth, the other one lies" puzzles?

I am giving 110% in trying to figure it out!

[PFVA]

A small intermission.
Why is everybody talking about the new Pope being an American (USA) and very few mentioning the fact he is also a naturalised Peruvian citizen?

[Harlequin]

A small intermission.
Why is everybody talking about the new Pope being an American (USA) and very few mentioning the fact he is also a naturalised Peruvian citizen?

Because he identifies more as a USAmerican than a South one, perhaps? I suppose it might also be that he only became Peruvian as part of his mission there for around 30% of his life.

[SuperMappy]

[Harlequin]

[PFVA]

And the noisy populist right, Trump's group calls 'The true patriots' basically ties for 2nd with the center left.

I don't understand the south of this country. Those areas that 50 years ago were communist are the ones who now are right wing populism.

Maybe it's the hot weather. Too many days of temperatures of 40ºC.

My municipality stayed basically the same. Center right won as always, noisy right, had 15% of the votes like the last time.

[tufty]

Those areas that 50 years ago were communist are the ones who now are right wing populism.

It's pretty simple. 40, 50 years ago, there was a split between conservative / ultra liberal parties and the socialist parties (across the whole of Europe). Since then, the "moderate" left has moved further and further to the right, fighting far less for the rights of the workers and instead embracing big business and big finance. And both the rightwing and nominally left wing press have very much pushed the idea that the actual left wing were dangerous radical communists, wanting to push us into a failing system like the USSR. The people who the left were supposed to be helping have been left behind. The "left" might be less awful for the workers, but that's it. Because the "left" need to pander to the needs of big business and big finance. Vote in the right wing, vote in the left wing, it's the same fucking shite. So the populist right, pretending to fight for worker's rights, playing on media war talking points, and making everything someone else's fault, are sweeping the boards. That's why we have Trump 2.0, it's what's happening in the UK with Reform...

[Dio]

To some extent true. But I think it's not an unreasonable argument to note that it's far from clear whether classic left wing politics would work in today's environment. You can't relocate the 'peasant' agricultural or low-skill manufacturing jobs back here, it's far too expensive to live here (by 10x compared to the alternatives, which no quantity of socialist policy could fix). There can't be a million miners in the UK today. In the absence of those big industries, what does "working class" socialist politics actually look like?

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have more socialist policies than we have, of course, or that the system is working for everyone. But the politics of 70s and 80s socialists sure as hell wouldn't work today. And the decline of the lefter wing has in part been driven by the inability or unwillingness of many left wing politicians to see that, since the level of incompetence and lack of focus amongst those has not improved since that time.

The solution that was chosen was to upskill and it did work moderately well. Between the mid-90s and 2010 the working class shrank, the middle class grew. And that's led pretty directly to today's situation where now the left wing is primarily the people who upskilled and the left-behind have gone elsewhere looking for anything that might work.

But I'm not aware of anyone who actually has much a plan to do anything for those people. Labour had something that sort of worked and they're going back to it, but I don't see it fixing the underlying issue. I'm not aware of any more radical left plan that seems either serious or significant enough (e.g. a wealth tax, much though I think we should have one, is not going to scratch this particular problem). Everything targetting the left-behind seems to be basically the Trump philosophy of "I don't care if I'm getting screwed if someone I hate is getting screwed worse", from either left or right. Reform's a bunch of buggers so they find it nice and easy to find unpopular people to screw over, of course.

[zip accident]

To some extent true. But I think it's not an unreasonable argument to note that it's far from clear whether classic left wing politics would work in today's environment. You can't relocate the 'peasant' agricultural or low-skill manufacturing jobs back here, it's far too expensive to live here (by 10x compared to the alternatives, which no quantity of socialist policy could fix). There can't be a million miners in the UK today. In the absence of those big industries, what does "working class" socialist politics actually look like?

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have more socialist policies than we have, of course, or that the system is working for everyone. But the politics of 70s and 80s socialists sure as hell wouldn't work today. And the decline of the lefter wing has in part been driven by the inability or unwillingness of many left wing politicians to see that, since the level of incompetence and lack of focus amongst those has not improved since that time.

The solution that was chosen was to upskill and it did work moderately well. Between the mid-90s and 2010 the working class shrank, the middle class grew. And that's led pretty directly to today's situation where now the left wing is primarily the people who upskilled and the left-behind have gone elsewhere looking for anything that might work.

But I'm not aware of anyone who actually has much a plan to do anything for those people. Labour had something that sort of worked and they're going back to it, but I don't see it fixing the underlying issue. I'm not aware of any more radical left plan that seems either serious or significant enough (e.g. a wealth tax, much though I think we should have one, is not going to scratch this particular problem). Everything targetting the left-behind seems to be basically the Trump philosophy of "I don't care if I'm getting screwed if someone I hate is getting screwed worse", from either left or right. Reform's a bunch of buggers so they find it nice and easy to find unpopular people to screw over, of course.

Well I'm going to blame Tony Blair's "Unemployment is not a long term benefit, if you're out of work long term you must be ill, so you're going on sickness benefit so I can say I cut unemployment". There were unemployed people in the '50s. just not so many. Soon it looks as if almost everyone is going to be unemployed, and that's going to be interesting.

[KlaxonCow]

Soon it looks as if almost everyone is going to be unemployed, and that's going to be interesting.

The complete lack of acknowledgement, much less having any kind of semblance of a plan, for how humanity even exists in a post-work, post-money world in political circles is deeply frightening.

Because even if we take the least hyped view of AI, that it's going to be a "partner" to human workers, that's still going to keep further eroding the workforce.

I've touched on this before, but the job losses don't typically come from showing up on a Monday morning to find "Robbie the robot" sitting at your desk. Workloads just get re-orientated, and one person ends up doing more work.

My example would be that large companies of the past would have had mail and print departments. Sizeable fully-staffed mini-businesses inside the larger business to handle internal communications and printing out materials. But what happens is that employees handle their own email and there's a networked deskjet at the end of the office for the increasingly rare occasions you ever need to put stuff onto paper.

And you typically don't see these jobs vanish, they're just not advertised for anymore because these departments no longer exist anywhere.

This is really where all the jobs are going and, no, it's not "immigrants" stealing all the jobs. It's Robbie the Robot eroding away the need for human labour here, and here, and here, and over there. And the more "Robbie" can do - with AI, with robotics, with automation - the fewer human jobs get advertised.

The jobs slip down the cracks between things. Everyone knows - all of us are increasingly doing jobs that took multiple people to perform in the past.

Like, where did all the secretaries go? They disappeared from folks handling their own emails, using the shared network "work calendar", automated scheduling, dictation software and so forth.

Even in the most pessimistic view, where AI is all hype and is just a "partner" to a human worker, it's still going to continue - and accelerate - this process of labour erosion. Everyone has an "expert" on hand and it's already penetrating where I work. I receive reports from others that I have to work into my own reports, and people are using AI to "tidy up" their output before it reaches me. Whenever we're discussing things, someone will inevitably tell us what ChatGPT thinks on the subject in that discussion.

But if we're more realistic, AI is going to make bigger in-roads than that. Certain jobs will, in fact, become 100% automated - this is part of why Trump's plan to bring manufacturing back to the US is so clueless, as increasingly factories do not feature human beings anymore, so you could bring it all back and still not make a significant impact on your employment rates (even if we ignore that it's shit low-paying work that we were happy to off-shore for a reason).

The best I've heard is discussion of "universal basic income". First, in a world where "benefit scroungers" are vilified, it's never going to work on a social level. But, more fundamentally, it's not a long-term solution. When the number of remaining taxpayers drops below the number of people claiming UBI, then how the hell do you even get the money to pay out your UBI in the first place? Much less the politics of it, where the UBI bill becomes a majority chunk of where all our taxes go. No-one's going to stand for it. But you can't reverse it, so where the hell do we even go?

To be clear, I don't see this as a new thing. It goes all the way back to the Luddites and the Jacquard loom, running off punched cards. It passes through car factories being filled with robots doing 99% of the work. It draws less commentary, but when PCs landed on every office desk that was undoubtedly much bigger than any of these historical examples.

This is the same story. We're still in the Industrial Revolution. But things like AI are accelerants poured onto those flames. And there will be more coming.

Indeed, this is the exact same story as the one where humanity invented fire or the wheel. Labour saving devices to tame and conquer nature's problems. That's always been the raison d'etre of technology from the very beginning.

And the thought experiment is real simple: What happens when we humans finally master it all? A vast array of labour-saving devices to the point where, actually, not a single human being needs to labour ever again (or, at least, if you do labour, then you're doing it for fun - you're no longer required to do it to continue existing).

In fact, in that light, is AI going to be that final perfect labour-saving device? Actually, probably not. Not in this broadest historical view. But it is a big step towards realising that "caveman's dream". Total mastery of the world that, actually, you have absolutely nothing whatsoever to be worried about and you don't need to do a single gorram thing ever again.

Maybe someone like Trump is inevitable. That, at first, there will be people who think the solution is to somehow force everything back to the 1950s and it'll all be okay again. Except, of course, it won't be. The concept doesn't even work in theory - what are you going to do? Hold the entire world in the 1950s for the rest of all time? Even you, who's advocating for it, knows that's nonsense and cannot possibly work.

But, in political circles, it's like none of this is happening. None of it has already happened. The future is just going to be more of the same for the rest of eternity, right?

Not a single word uttered. Not a single semblance of a plan to be seen.

It's all just fingers-in-ears, chanting "la-la-la-la, I'm not listening", as this train slams into a brick wall at 1000 mph. And the strategy seems to be "if you don't think about it, you can almost convince yourself that it's not going to happen... even though we all know it's going to happen".

Truth is, people ask how Trump won. Simple - he's the only politician who even acknowledged there was a problem, and that weirdly makes him a "working class hero" in MAGA circles, even though he's a billionaire moron who has no idea how anything works and is so out-of-touch with reality, he's only learnt and first used the word "groceries" in his late 70s, for fuck's sake:



It's atrocious, for sure. But there honestly is a logic to it. Because he's a moron, he doesn't understand that he's supposed to be doing the "la-la-la-la, I'm not listening" thing and pretending like the world isn't about to slam into a brick wall at 1000mph. So he actually talks about his ridiculous never-going-to-work plans of forcing the world to be the 1950s again, forever more.

And it's dumb, and it's stupid, and it's never going to work. But there is a part of me that understand why it got votes: Trump actually vocalised the pain that vast swathes of the working class feel. He was the only one who didn't pretend like they didn't exist. He's never actually going to do anything remotely useful for them, but just to have someone speak your pain out loud and lie to you that they've got some idea how to fix it. Well, just watch Farage and Reform - and right-wingers all over the world - storm to victory on the same schtick. "I feel your pain". They can't remotely fix it, but it's nice to hear someone at least acknowledge it exists, yes?

"It's going to be interesting" is an even bigger understatement than "we live in interesting times".

[Mat]

Like, where did all the secretaries go? They disappeared from folks handling their own emails, using the shared network "work calendar", automated scheduling, dictation software and so forth.

I was thinking on this just recently.
I remember going to my Dad's office frequently in the 70s and 80s; he was a social worker.
They had a pool of typists for typing up hand-written reports.

And of course, nowadays everyone is their own typist, and no-one hand-writes anything work-related.


Breaking off at a tangent, but still sticking with the encroaching jobless future, I went along to the industry show in London last week, MPTS.
I wasn't really there to see new tech, but rather to meet up with old colleagues.
And the overall feeling was that the industry is dying on its feet; less employment opportunities, less money to fund projects, less advancement prospects.
Old media is flailing around for a role after the rapid rise of social media and the streaming services. In addition, there's pressure from the top, as in all publicly traded corporations, to maximise shareholder value while decreasing costs, leading to increased automation and less investment in people.

It's pretty grim out there at the moment.

And with no political party willing to acknowledge that this is happening, it's only going to get worse.

On top of that, you've got the slap in the face of ever-increasing retirement ages. I would guess that everyone here is facing a retirement age of 67; and to me, that seems drastically unfair. I suspect I won't have much time left after retiring at that age.
I did actually manage to start contributing to a workplace pension scheme before it became law, back when I moved to London in 2007, so I'm hoping to contribute enough to retire early.

But not everyone will have that choice, and as always, the poorest in society will suffer the most.
Those who can't afford to over-contribute to a workplace pension will be forced to retire at 67, possibly 68, and due to being poorer, are likely to suffer more health conditions, so in all likelihood will have less time to enjoy their retirement.

[Dio]

On top of that, you've got the slap in the face of ever-increasing retirement ages. I would guess that everyone here is facing a retirement age of 67; and to me, that seems drastically unfair. I suspect I won't have much time left after retiring at that age.

But that was always the deal with the state pension. It was not created to deal with most people living 10+ years after retirement, let alone 20.

Indeed, go back 50 years and many of the working class men are dead well before getting a pension at all. My mum's from the Rhondda, where my granddad, a coal hewer, died at the age of 46. I did a bunch of my mum's family tree, I went through a load of census records from the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are no old men. The few that even make their late 50s have surface jobs like a grocer or a pub landlord. It's not just people are getting out of the area as there are still plenty of older women around.

The way that many of our parents retired in their late 50s and most of them lived on 15-30 years afterwards is the real aberration. With average life expectancy now nearly 80, demographics are inevitably going to move the state pension age to 70+. But, as you say, the people still working in their late 60s are going to be on low-wage (and therefore low tax receipt) jobs, and be people who don't have a choice, and probably doing manual labour jobs. Another problem I don't see any easy way out of.

[tufty]

It's not the working class who are going to lose their jobs, though. Sure, your shitty office job is gonna get eaten by AI. Hell, even your well paid programming job is going to get very much "downsized". It's the middle class, maybe the lower middle class, they're gonna get really fucking badly hurt. But the working class? Those people who were unable to take Dio's elitist "just upskill" solution, either due to location, ability, or class / race / sex bias, a lot of their jobs still exist. Sure, the manufacturing sector got decimated as manufacturing went overseas, and that's not coming back any time soon, mining went the way of the dodo, and a lot of manual labour, particularly in agriculture, has been removed due to mechanisation, but there are a shit load of jobs that you simply can't automate away, and those jobs need to be done.

And those jobs, sadly, /are/ being taken away by immigrants. Because the immigrants are willing to work more hours in worse conditions for less pay. Don't believe me? Get off your comfortable office chair, and go put a month in on a building site.

70s and 80s leftism doesn't work? Bollocks it doesn't. Might not work to save your fucking cushty little office job, but it does work to make everyone's life better in jobs that actually involve doing real physical work. The reason people don't think it works is because they've been told to think it doesn't work. All those strikes, couldn't save the mines. Nothing could save the mines. What we need is more radical leftism, not less. An actual move away from capitalism, and particularly away from the free market capitalism that's been fucking us up the arse since the '80s. We don't need to tax the rich, we need to string the cunts up, display their severed heads on pikes on London Bridge.

[zip accident]

Soon it looks as if almost everyone is going to be unemployed, and that's going to be interesting.

The complete lack of acknowledgement, much less having any kind of semblance of a plan, for how humanity even exists in a post-work, post-money world in political circles is deeply frightening.

(To long, read a few lines at the beginning and end, but mostly not read.)

The plan is the rich get richer.

I recall reading that Mr Starmer said something like "we are the party of working people" shortly after the local government elections, but I didn't bookmark it and can't now find it.

Who are the party of the unemployed?

[Mat]

What we need is more radical leftism, not less. An actual move away from capitalism, and particularly away from the free market capitalism that's been fucking us up the arse since the '80s. We don't need to tax the rich, we need to string the cunts up, display their severed heads on pikes on London Bridge.

My sentiments exactly, and I have one of those cushty little office jobs. Just so happens to overlook London Bridge...