

UPDATE:
Well, they lost the appeal and from midnight it will be illegal to be a member. Maximum sentence 14 years in prison, so I strongly suggest you don’t choose this moment to join.
London-based writer. Often climbing.
UPDATE:
Well, they lost the appeal and from midnight it will be illegal to be a member. Maximum sentence 14 years in prison, so I strongly suggest you don’t choose this moment to join.
I don’t think you read or understood my comment if this is your response.
Just for anyone still following this odd developing story, Corbyn has now issued a statement in which he says ‘discussions are still ongoing’ about a ‘real alternative’, but does not say he’s going to be co-leader of anything. This seems to me to match what Jessica Elgot and Gabriel Pogrund were reporting yesterday: that, contra Zarah Sultana’s statement, there’s not (yet) a new party and Corbyn is not co-leader.
No. You’ve taken one thing - the BBC pressurises their journalists to cover Israel positively, which I agree is true - and assumed it means a second thing - that (1) the BBC (2) smeared Corbyn (3) as an antisemite (numbers here because these are three separate claims that you haven’t justified, within the broader claim you also haven’t justified). You’ve then additionally taken that bundle of unproven claims as evidence of another different claim: that ‘the media’ as a whole, i.e., not just the BBC, ‘smeared Corbyn’ because he ‘opposed Israel’.
With respect, this is exactly what I meant about conspiracist thinking: you’re taking loosely related ideas (some of them true, some of them not) and bundled them together to claim a vaguely defined malevolent entity (‘the media’) is out to get someone. This is conspiracist thinking! That’s what that is!
Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.
I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!
I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.
Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.
Yes, it’s fair - and indeed, good and right - to be sceptical. But we have to temper the scepticism with realism, which is the tricky bit!
Not about Corbyn!
This is not inconsistent with anything I said yesterday or, indeed, this morning.
There was not an organised media smear campaign against Corbyn. ‘The media’ is not in any sense a group of people who said ‘Let’s all agree to tell lies about Corbyn’, which is what an organised smear campaign would have to look like. The media has always been persistently unfair, to the level of insanity, about everyone to the left of the Conservatives, but there’s nothing organised about it, it’s just powerful people representing their own interests.
Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.
I always call out this conspiracist stuff when the right do it, so I’ll do exactly the same when it come from the left.
As @flamingos-cant@feddit.uk put it, ‘either those reports are true or Corbyn went radio silent on the announcement of his new party and let there be room for this speculation.’ In fact, both sides are true: the party has been ‘launched’ without a coherent structure, leadership or even a name (if I’m wrong about this, just… tell me the name), and Corbyn has chosen to say nothing about it. These are facts. There’s no smear involved.
Accidentally launching a party co-lead by someone who doesn’t want to lead it is something only the British left could’ve accomplished.
-There have long been significant divisions between senior figures close to Corbyn over how such a movement on the left should operate - some keen to begin as a new party and others less so. Sources adamant tonight Corbyn not agreed to any joint leadership of a new party.
I don’t think R2B’s ever worked that way, it’s always been tenants only!
Corbyn’s already said he’s not joining, amazing stuff.
the actual tenants who want to buy the homes they’ve raised kids in will simply not be able to afford the homes
But only they will be eligible to buy them. So, either they get to buy them or they just get to stay. Win-win?
Doesn’t go as far forward as I’d like, but I don’t see a backward step here. More homes is good, more money for more homes is good, social housing is the best kind of housing, and mitigating the worst of right to buy is still a forward move, even if it’s not a whole step forward. So I make that 3.5 steps forward, 0 steps back!
So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that’s your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there’s space for that.
Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that’s your art.
Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.
You don’t need an uncritical belief in the Labour Theory of Value to think that human labour has a special value and dignity to it. The people who want AI to replace many kinds of intellectual labour just don’t believe that there’s a value to human labour, and I do think this is fundamentally an antihuman, misanthropic way of looking at the world.
The issue is not that you don’t understand the arguments but that you don’t appear to understand the sentences! Respectfully, I think you can probably understand why I’m not interested in reading my comments back to you, which is what the discussion would entail at this point.