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IWW. ACAB. Trans rights are human rights. None are free until all are free. Under the streets, the beach. He/him.

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Last Notes

2024-03-01 06:49:27

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's own money, as the saying goes, and imported its traditional management issues.
What I'm more interested in is this: Boeing is a very heavily subsidised company, both at the state level and the federal level. As such, a fine is simply the US taxpayer moving money from one pocket to another. It is difficult to imagine a situation where the US allows Boeing to collapse. Does Boeing realise that this makes them functionally immune to fines? If so, what does that mean for future regulatory compliance and future safety standards?

2024-02-27 07:19:28

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
I think it's a little more nuanced than that: it's class war, yes, but I think it's also panic.
"When in mortal danger
When beset by doubt
Run around in little circles
Wave your hands and shout"
The Conservative Party is in complete disarray. They've been unable to reconcile their Brexiteer faction with their capitalist faction with their social-conservative faction with whatever Truss and Kwarteng's faction is called. Nothing they're doing is working. Their core constituencies of spiteful retired racists who can only achieve joy from looking at house price graphs and guys who think that if they buy more poppies for their 4x4s it'll make them the hero of an Andy McNab novel are dispirited and slipping to further-Right parties.
So, like a husband who knows he's about to be divorced and knows he deserves it, they're trying to reference back to a time when they were in agreement, playing the song they first danced to in the hope that it'll keep her around one day longer. It's pathetic, in the literal sense of the word, a panic that comes from deep in the gut rather than any rational analysis of the situation.
It's also extremely destructive and shitty, because they're Tories and they're shitty people.

2024-02-22 17:51:40

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
The irony there is that there's already precedent for this sort of thing: Theresa May's actions to blanket-exonerate British soldiers from being prosecuted for war crimes during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

2024-02-19 06:53:32

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
Is there a word for "we were worried that a real policy might be introduced by the next government to solve a social issue we didn't want solved, so we decided to forestall the issue by introducing a weak and unenforceable policy that's intentionally designed to do nothing, in the hope that the next government is fooled by its existence and behaves as if the problem is already solved?"
If there isn't, I'm going to coin the phrase "Goveing it" for such a situation. Holiday houses have been Goved.

2024-01-23 08:23:11

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
Wow, what happened to Cardiff here? Their numbers have absolutely fallen off a cliff in percentage terms, bucking the overall trend.

2023-12-12 07:38:14

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
One might say that they forgot the lesson of the 2008 crash but remembered the lesson of the 2008 bailout.

2023-12-01 09:44:23

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
Apologies for my earlier harshness. As you say, you only know the farmers you know; the rich farmers and the absolutely destitute casual labourers might not be in your social circles. If your friends are doing poorly then I'm sorry to hear that and I wish them well.
I can absolutely believe that many small farmers are doing badly. Even before the UK's current economic situation, farms needed to be subsidised in order to exist at all. Once you add that economic situation, I'm surprised that any small farmers aren't struggling.
Statistically, the average farm household made £46,500 in 2020/2021, the most recent year the ONS will give me stats for. (This is after farm expenses but before their own family costs.) They note that this number is likely to rise in 2022 and 2023 due to rising food costs, with dairy farms rising the most at 20-30%. This is about half again the average household income in the UK, and about three times the average household income of the poorest 20% of people in the UK.
So these small farmers are, on average, still significantly better off than most people. This doesn't mean they're not doing badly of course - most people are doing badly - but it means that this is still a better-off group who are better off due to inherited wealth.
But I found something else looking at the stats. You have probably heard this anecdotally, but here is data. According to ONS, 52% of English small farms get a return of less than £1 per every £1 they put in, which is to say that they're actively losing money on the farming. That number goes up to two-thirds getting less than £1.10 back for every £1 they put in, and 90% getting less than £1.40 back for every £1 they put in. (This number has labour factored in, including hours of unpaid labour.)
So while most English farmers are doing comfortably in their household finances, most of their farms are non-viable as businesses. If your friends say "I'd make a better living if I sold up and did something else with my days", then statistically they're likely to be right.

2023-12-01 08:18:39

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
Tell me about the labourers on those farms. Are they also struggling financially? Do they live in houses or in caravans?

2023-12-01 07:44:05

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
As Alinsky pointed out, if you make policy for winning elections rather than for running the country, then you're not compromising your values to get elected; rather, those are your values.
Most rural British people do not own farms. This isn't support for rural people, it's support for the minority of rural people who are agricultural landowners. If prioritising the landowners for support is your value (using Alinsky's argument) then you're not winning votes from the Tories, you are the Tories.

2023-11-12 10:45:20

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 @npub1qg4…augv
Thanks for writing it! I'm enjoying it, and it's helping me firm up my own thinking on the topic. IMHO Aral is clearly right when he talks about what the phrase means nowadays, and your theory explains a lot around that.
There is a saying that one only understands a system once one sees it in a broken state. Based on that, the age of Putin, Netanyahu and Braverman is a good test for theories of the rule of law.

2023-11-12 10:25:32

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@npub1qg4…augv
I'm reading a book called The Rule of Law by @npub1g0t…tvm4 . I expected it to be a book laying out the liberal case for the rule of law, why it's good, blah blah blah.
In the fucking introduction, he blows that away. "The rule of law", he says, is a phrase that liberals use which they assume justifies itself and don't really examine further. Does it refer to laws being obeyed? No, he says, giving examples of cases where people condemn certain laws as being "against the rule of law." Rather, it's an ideological thing. It refers to the idea of laws, rather than to their reality. It cannot fail, only be failed, it is circularly defined, and it's vague enough for an advocate to invoke whenever they like while being too vague for a critic to nail down.
The rest of the book is about examining this using the tools we use to talk about ideologies, rather than about actual legal theory. I'm enjoying it and looking forward to finishing it.
He doesn't make the following comparison (so far as I've got) but I'm going to, because it stuck in my mind: liberals believe in "the rule of law" like Marxists believe in "the people." If a communist state faces opposition from its populace, then that doesn't mean that "the people" disapprove of communism; rather it means that the regime needs to repress the populace in the name of "the people." Similarly, a state which passes harmful laws which stunt personal liberty and economic development doesn't mean that "the rule of law" has failed; rather it means that those laws are against "the rule of law."
It's a god one can invoke to do the thing one needs to do to maintain power, same as any other god.

2023-10-30 22:17:27

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@npub19fc…ay3c
How do you think they'll monetise it? Advertising isn't easy here.

2023-09-24 08:43:44

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
I used to live in an area with large fancy luxury housing towers. At night you could see the lights come on and guess how many people lived there. Most of the luxury towers were at most 30% full.
I talked to a comrade who's an architect. She mentioned that many of these new developments have kitchens and bathrooms that are too small to easily be used, because they're not intended to be used: the flats aren't meant for human habitation, just for sale as an asset.

2023-08-16 08:23:10

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 @npub1g0t…tvm4
I feel that this is less about making perfect the enemy of the good, and more about making it a gamble that doesn't end up costing more than it gains.
I'll go out on a limb here: the international criminal court has been harmful to the cause of liberal internationalism. This could have been the keystone of an international order, a sign that nobody is beyond the law. Instead it ended up being the opposite, a public performance of the fact that well-connected people are very much beyond the law.
The people who have been tried there are clearly guilty. That's a problem. A show trial delegitimises the concept of a trial. A show trial where it's understood that only those who've already lost power will ever face justice, delegitimises it further. There are people who loathe the liberal idea of justice, and will misrepresent it to attack it, and so far the ICC has been living up to that misrepresentation more than the idea itself.
I don't want to overstate the role of the ICC in the decline of the liberal internationalist world order, but I think it did play a part. There was a cost to setting it up, a cost paid in legitimacy, and that cost appears to have been sunk.
Let's learn from our mistakes.

2023-08-15 21:27:09

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@npub189n…satx
I'm white. I'm the child of anti-apartheid activist who fled from South Africa. I grew up seeing my parents angry. I remember them listening to the radio and watching the television, angry. When their friends came over, they would all get angry together. That kind of anger leaks. It becomes your background, your emotional norm. It creeps into other emotions. It isn't a healthy environment in which to have a relationship or raise a child. It's certainly not a healthy environment in which to learn what it is to be male.
Nowadays I'm an antifascist activist. I'm angry. I go to bed angry and when I wake up I read Mastodon and the news and I get angry. I'm aware it affects my relationships and my physical and mental health. And yet, what choice do I have? As you point out, I can't not be angry about this.

2023-08-15 21:01:10

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@npub1g0t…tvm4
I'm trying to think of the circumstances under which, for example, the US would allow the extradition of Clarence Thomas to stand trial in an international court. Even under a relatively internationalist president like Biden, that feels like a stretch.
If a corruption law doesn't bind the greatest and most powerful, then it loses its legitimacy and becomes just another weapon in their hands: that is, another avenue for corruption.