Peterson, Harris, etc....

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berbatrick said:
I'm not sure that attributing the boom of the 90s entirely to them is correct- after all one judges politicians primarily by what happens under their watch- I think the emergence of computers might have a more important role, as well as the collapse of the USSR and worldwide lowering of trade barriers which gave western capital more places to go and more profits to collect. Of course, the availability of cheap credit, at least partly an effect of Reagan and Thatcher's deregulation, further fueled this boom.

The growth of the 2000s was stopped by a recession from which there has been little recovery (basically a reversion to 2008 numbers in the US, not even that in the UK); this recession might well be tied to the nature of the increase itself, especially the deregulation/financialisation.


The end result of this era, has been that the bottom 20% are literally stuck where they were before Reagan and the median has struggled to a 20% increase, while the top 5% have almost doubled their wealth.
Click to expand...
Breaking the unions and making home ownership an aspiration for all helped to create the boom that led to the bust with the banks and landlords protected from it and the poorest suffering most. Selling off the council house stock and privatising essential nationalised industries like power, rail, mail, telephone service etc again allowed the rich to get richer and left everyone else stagnating with higher bills and worse services and those graphs clearly show that the trend is getting worse.

From WWII onwards there's been a pretty steady growth of 10-20% per decade but the policies instigated by Thatcher and Reagan ensured that the growth was concentrated in the pockets of the wealthiest only and the differential between the 95th percentile and 99th percentile is even more telling. On salary alone I'm theoretically on the cusp of the 95th percentile but had I not set foot on the housing ladder in the mid 90s I would not be able to get a mortgage on the far from grandiose 3 bed semi former council house we own given how its value has increased, I'm alright as a result but it's my daughters generation that did not benefit from the free education I received and are facing a future where they start out saddled with 30k in debt and have almost zero chance of getting onto the housing ladder who have been truly fecked over by the growing finaincial divide in our society.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It's interesting that people blame Thatcher and Reagan for the current shit show when their time in power was followed by the most affluent couple of decades in modern history. And that affluence was felt throughout society, top to bottom. It's only when the economy faltered that we saw austerity politics come into play and genuine economic hardship start to increase.

Which partly explains why I'm a bit nihilist when it comes to politics. Even when you have obvious right wing shit gibbons like Reagan and Thatcher in power, you can end up with a massively improved standard of living for everyone, whether they were rich or poor to begin with. Similarly, ousting them for the far left flavour of the month carries absolutely no guarantee that this will improve life for the majority of people. In fact, we've feck all evidence from anywhere in the world, anywhere in history, that Corbyn's ideology has a realistic chance of making the world a better place. Certainly not for longer than the 20+ years of affluence that followed on from the era when Thatcher/Reagan were in power.

To me it just seems like politicians fiddle round the edges, while a relentlessly increasing human population and technological advances cycles us through booms and busts, with different generations either lucking out or being fecked over by the timing of the up and down turns in the global economy. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who tries to tell me that their ideology is the "correct" one and we'd all be grand if it wasn't for the other guy, who ruined it for everyone.' But maybe that's just me. I do quite envy the certainty of youth. Life feels much more straightforward when you can so easily identify the enemy. I just think reality is far too complicated to try to apportion blame like that.
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Spot on. I think all of this hit the nail on the head.
 
Silva said:
yes suicide rates for the most disadvantaged when talking about quality life where thatcher and reagan ruled is less relevant than total worldwide suicide rates

i guess the IMF saying there's poverty globally means that the increase in poverty in the UK in the 10s doesn't count
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:boring:

Those “total worldwide suicide” rates conveniently provide a breakdown by country. You really need to pay more attention to detail.
 
this page is a perfect test case for why charlatans like peterson make it so big, you get people like @berbatrick posting stats that show that the policies of reagan and thatcher only led to increased inequality and that their economic boom was confined to a small minority of the population which gets completely ignored for self congratulatory wankery with zero backing from people who think the height to politics is having a civility fetish
 
Silva said:
Which decades were people overly nice in? Segregation was law in living memory. Marital rape was legal over the world until the 90s. Homosexuality was illegal and gay people castrated in living memory. We've invaded several countries and bombed their people. Theresa May installed a hostile environment for foreign people and Labour responded by trying to be tough on immigrants as well. ICE is currently keeping children in cages. The war on drugs has been going for decades and targeting minorities. When the feck were were too nice?
Click to expand...

You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. At no point has the population at large been too nice. There are a number of "old" people that think "young" people are now too nice, and that word nice has been corrupted as a result, but even then, they don't think that of the population overall. Nice is obviously a subjective thing but I'd be surprised if anyone would pick out a point in time when the entire human race was too nice.

The "too nice" comment was about "leftists" and their meek responses to many of the things you've listed. Probably the only time people on the left weren't too nice in the Western world was for that brief period when they fought against segregation aggressively and often violently. So after years of being "too nice" - a prevalent perception of the left on both sides of the aisle - the left, and particularly the young left, is taking a different approach. Your approach to political conversations being an example of that.

That was the point Cheesy raised that I was discussing with him. If you're not arsed enough to read the context of our conversations, that's cool, no offence taken. But you probably shouldn't bother picking out sentences from the conversation at all in that case, because it's easy to misunderstand things without context.

Silva said:
this page is a perfect test case for why charlatans like peterson make it so big, you get people like @berbatrick posting stats that show that the policies of reagan and thatcher only led to increased inequality and that their economic boom was confined to a small minority of the population which gets completely ignored for self congratulatory wankery with zero backing from people who think the height to politics is having a civility fetish
Click to expand...

Everyone's entitled to their own perceptions and all, but your understanding of the discussion and the points made within it is objectively wrong...or your only interest is to point score on the internet by deliberately misrepresenting what people said. So in a roundabout way I agree with you, part of this discussion illustrates why his messages resonate with people. But it's because the way you try to discuss these things make people disillusioned with people like you, who represent your views, which ultimately makes people less inclined to hear those views, and instead go into their own bubble. He's been pretty good at operating within that bubble, but all you're doing is reinforcing it. So either your motives or your tactics aren't well aligned with the intended results of your actions.
 
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Silva said:
total rate has increased in the us and remained even in the uk, with disabled people attempting at 200% what they were before the recession, as posted above
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Feck me. You’re either spectacularly stupid, having a bit of a brain fart or flat out lying (I’m going with one of the latter two options because I know you’re not stupid).

Whatever, you’re blatantly misrepresenting the data on the previous page because you’re so intent on winning the argument that facts no longer matter to you. Which neatly proves the point @Brwned is making and the feedback you’ve got from a whole load of different people on assorted threads in this forum.

You’re turning into the Glastonspaz of Current Events. Making people go against their natural inclinations by being so annoying in the way you argue your point.
 
Brwned said:
You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. At no point has the population at large been too nice. There are a number of "old" people that think "young" people are now too nice, but even then, they don't think that of the population overall. Nice is obviously a subjective thing but I'd be surprised if anyone would pick out a point in time when the entire human race was too nice.

The "too nice" comment was about "leftists" and their meek responses to many of the things you've listed. Probably the only time people on the left weren't too nice in the Western world was for that brief period when they fought against segregation. So after years of being "too nice" - a prevalent perception of the left on both sides of the aisle - the left, and particularly the young left, is taking a different approach. Your approach to political conversations being an example of that.

That was the point Cheesy raised that I was discussing with him. If you're not arsed enough to read the context of our conversations, that's cool, no offence taken. But you probably shouldn't bother picking out sentences from the conversation at all in that case, because it's easy to misunderstand things without context.



Everyone's entitled to their own perceptions and all, but your understanding of the discussion and the points made within it is objectively wrong...
Click to expand...
Carter reneged on his liberal drug policy. Clinton made the criminal system harsher on African Americans and refused to implement universal healthcare. Obama ramped up deportations and started the family separation policy that Trump ramped up recently. Obama also increased the powers that were passed after 9/11 and widened the drone program.

Even perception wise, the "snowflake" shit is recent history. The left was seen as degenerate heathens in recent decades. In Europe blasphemy laws were used almost exclusively against the left. Police departments have targeted left-leaning campaigners more than right-leaning campaigners, with the Metropolitan police having files on the likes of Caroline Lucas. People who have campaigned against oil companies have been painted as eco terrorists.

Abolitionists were treated like terrorists. Anti-segregation campaigners were arrested and painted as terrorist. LGBT campaigners were treated like utter shit and accused of trying to destroy society as late as the 90s. And called immoral in parliament as recently as a few years ago in the Gay Marriage debates.

Workers rights campaigners and people who went on strike weren't called soft or snowflakes, they were called communists and accused of trying to kill people like Stalin did.
 
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Silva said:
Carter reneged on his liberal drug policy. Clinton made the criminal system harsher on African Americans and refused to implement universal healthcare. Obama ramped up deportations and started the family separation policy that Trump ramped up recently. Obama also increased the powers that were passed after 9/11 and widened the drone program.

Even perception wise, the "snowflake" shit is recent history. The left was seen as degenerate heathens in recent decades. In Europe blasphemy laws were used almost exclusively against the left. Police departments have targeted left-leaning campaigners more than right-leaning campaigners, with the Metropolitan police having files on the likes of Caroline Lucas. People who have campaigned against oil companies have been painted as eco terrorists.

Abolitionists were treated like terrorists. Anti-segregation campaigners were arrested and painted as terrorist. LGBT campaigners were treated like utter shit and accused of trying to destroy society as late as the 90s. And called immoral as recently as a few years ago in the Gay Marriage debates.

Workers rights weren't called soft or snowflakes, they were called communists and accused of trying to kill people like Stalin did.
Click to expand...

I'm not 100% sure what point you're arguing against, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't contradict the initial point being made.

Right wing folks used whatever tactics they could to smear people on the left, either out of genuine fear or because of more self-serving reasons. So on the one hand they would mock the left for being too nice, but on the other hand they would attack them for being terrorists, communists, etc. Naturally people on the left do the same thing to those on the right. Hypocrisy is everywhere. Various branches of the state did the same for the same reasons when people on the left were judged to be a threat. They also did the same with people on the right when it suited them.

The over simplification that has existed for a long time is that the right are too mean and the left are too nice. When you look at the policies supported by the majority of both groups, it's not hard to see why. There have been dozens of democratic senators that have said that they need to "get tough" because the people on the opposite aisle were using tactics that exploited a weakness on their side, and when the time came to do the same, the democratic senators let them away with it. It's been caricatured in pop culture, discussed in the news media, talked about by the political establishment...it's not a controversial thought. The most obvious example is the double standards applied for supreme court nominees and the tactics employed by both parties.

One of the trends now is how young people on the left are speaking up about the fact they're fed up with their elected representatives being too nice, and they're taking a different approach. It's pretty obvious that you don't have any interest in being nice, and your approach to discussing these things aligns with these talking points and from what I've seen, it's a fairly good representation of how the young left approach discussions in general.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It's interesting that people blame Thatcher and Reagan for the current shit show when their time in power was followed by the most affluent couple of decades in modern history. And that affluence was felt throughout society, top to bottom. It's only when the economy faltered that we saw austerity politics come into play and genuine economic hardship start to increase.
Click to expand...

I'm not entire sure what you mean by "affluent decades". If I go with what I think you mean the increased standards of living were mostly the result of long term technological advances that have nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher policies. The Space Race created a lot of foundational technologies and other things like the government-university ARPANET project are the foundation for the entire internet and the trillions of world wide business associated. These things were building for a long time and would have happened even if Democrats/Labour won instead of the right-wing Reagan and Thatcher. All they really did was stand by while Volcker and the monetary policy tweaks fixed the inflation problems and the oil crisis abated. It was more luck of timing that made them seem more prescient than they were. Even the collapse of the USSR had less to do with Reagan than popular myth as it was the long term economic warfare strategy of the US since 1950s to use economic leverage and in general it was the Soviets reliance on natural resources and failure to develop a robust internal economy that meant they would always collapse around this time period.

So nothing about Reagan or Thatcher were actually responsible for any of the technological advancements realized in the 90s/00s. These were all long term developments that were happening when Reagan was still spying on alleged Hollywood communists at the Screen Actors Guild. To get into the details, the history of Silicon Valley shows the combination of factors that were responsible for these 'affluent decades;.

The other flaw with reducing something to an "affluent decade" was already mentioned and that is inequality. Reagan and Thatcher policies directly accelerated inequality and essentially severed as wealth re-distribution from the bottom to the tippity top.
https://scienceleadership.org/blog/reaganomics_and_the_people

daf515bfe.png


Then you have the stagnation in economic mobility which is a very troublesome factor over time as it creates a de facto aristocracy or plutocracy more accurately.

999c60f6b.png


But inequality is just one measure. There are a host of other factors that been intentionally eroded for the average working and middle class: job security, retirement security, protection from losing life savings due to medical emergency, etc. Just a short sample:

  1. Even the Insured Often Can't Afford Their Medical Bills
  2. Fed survey: 40 percent of adults can't cover a $400 emergency expense
  3. Americans’ Confidence in Their Ability to Pay for Health Care Is Falling
Then we have:
Yes, Some Companies Are Cutting Hours In Response To ‘Obamacare’

So while people are technically employed its harder to find a single job that will even hire full time because of the burden. All this started with Reagan (and Thatcher in the UK) to shift the countries further to the right. Here is a great art from 1990 that is still relevant :

New York Times 1990 said:
The 1980's were the triumph of Upper America - an ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the rich and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance. Not only did the concentration of wealth quietly intensify, but the sums involved took a megaleap. The definition of who's rich - and who's no longer rich - changed as radically during the Reagan era as it did during the great nouveaux-riches eras of the late 19th century and the 1920's, periods whose excesses preceded the great reformist upheavals of the Progressive era and the New Deal.

But while money, greed and luxury became the stuff of popular culture, few people asked why such great wealth had concentrated at the top and whether this was the result of public policy. Political leaders, even those who professed to care about the armies of homeless sleeping on grates and other sad evidence of a polarized economy, had little to say about the Republican Party's historical role: to revitalize capitalism but also to tilt power, Government largess, more wealth and income toward the richest portion of the population.

No parallel upsurge of riches had been seen since the late 19th century, the era of the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers. It was the truly wealthy, more than anyone else, who flourished under Reagan. Calculations in a Brookings Institution study found that the share of national income going to the wealthiest 1 percent rose from 8.1 percent in 1981 to 14.7 percent in 1986. Between 1981 and 1989, the net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans nearly tripled. At the same time, the division between them and the rest of the country became a yawning gap. In 1980, corporate chief executive officers, for example, made roughly 40 times the income of average factory workers. By 1989, C.E.O.'s were making 93 times as much. Finance alone built few billion-dollar fortunes in the 1980's relative to service industries like real estate and communications, but it is hard to overstate Wall Street's role during the decade, partly because Federal monetary and fiscal policies favored financial assets and because deregulation promoted new debt techniques and corporate restructuring.
Click to expand...
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/17/magazine/a-capital-offense-reagan-s-america.html


Oh I can't leave out the S+L scandal too often forgotten (along with Iran-Contra that isn't as relevant here to econ)

NY Times Aug 23 said:
It was Ronald Reagan's deregulation program that freed the savings and loans from the restrictions of their historical role. The Reagan Administration made good on its promise to get Government off the back of business, with a special bonus for the savings and loans: they were given the chance to make large, high-risk loans without risk to themselves. The Government, which is to say the taxpayers, continued to insure them for the new loans as it had for home loans.

Lifting the restrictions on loans while leaving Government insurance in place was a prescription for disaster, even without the fraud and corruption that developed. Democrats certainly share the guilt. By and large they joined the Republicans in giving Ronald Reagan whatever he wanted.
Click to expand...

Really Reagan and Thatcher began a wealth grab by the richest pursuing policies solely intended to benefit the richest individuals and most powerful corporations.
 
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Brwned said:
I'm not 100% sure what point you're arguing against, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't contradict the initial point being made.

Right wing folks used whatever tactics they could to smear people on the left, either out of genuine fear or because of more self-serving reasons. So on the one hand they would mock the left for being too nice, but on the other hand they would attack them for being terrorists, communists, etc. Naturally people on the left do the same thing to those on the right. Hypocrisy is everywhere. Various branches of the state did the same for the same reasons when people on the left were judged to be a threat. They also did the same with people on the right when it suited them.

The over simplification that has existed for a long time is that the right are too mean and the left are too nice. When you look at the policies supported by the majority of both groups, it's not hard to see why. There have been dozens of democratic senators that have said that they need to "get tough" because the people on the opposite aisle were using tactics that exploited a weakness on their side, and when the time came to do the same, the democratic senators let them away with it. It's been caricatured in pop culture, discussed in the news media, talked about by the political establishment...it's not a controversial thought. The most obvious example is the double standards applied for supreme court nominees and the tactics employed by both parties.

One of the common talking points now is how young people on the left are fed up with their elected representatives being too nice, and they're taking a different approach. It's pretty obvious that you don't have any interest in being nice, and your approach to discussing these things aligns with these talking points and from what I've seen, it's a fairly good representation of how the young left approach discussions in general.
Click to expand...
the point is isn't not a decades long thing

the red scare/McCarthyism and communism has been a bigger smear than any soft or snowflake accusations for economic leftists

terrorism and destroying the fabric of society has been a bigger smear for social campaigners, LGBT people for example were painted as being inherently sick until the 90s

you've bought into a ben shapiro meme that picked up a few years ago
 
Silva said:
the point is isn't not a decades long thing

the red scare/McCarthyism and communism has been a bigger smear than any soft or snowflake accusations for economic leftists

terrorism and destroying the fabric of society has been a bigger smear for social campaigners, LGBT people for example were painted as being inherently sick until the 90s

you've bought into a ben shapiro meme that picked up a few years ago
Click to expand...

You're still arguing a different point. Would you say the majority of young, politically active people on the left now would say that they're fed up of their representatives being too nice for too long? Not that they were saying it decades ago, but that as they assess things now, they think part of the problem is that the people that are supposed to represent them didn't represent them well, in part because of a lack of backbone?

And yes I know there are many people on the left that view many of their representatives as warmongers, thieves, idiots and many other things. Different people have different opinions even in that specific group. But if you were to take a stab at the consensus, do you think there is a consensus that being "too nice" - or whatever synonym you want to put in there - is an issue of their representatives?

It might sound unbelievable to you but I've not heard Ben Shapiro speak, and don't frequent twitter, so the idea of me buying into this meme only makes sense in your own head. That's what I mean about the bubble. I have listened to different people with different political perspectives talk about "the other side", and I'm aware that some get passed down through some of the people in this thread...but believe it or not I'm able to form my own thoughts too. You're not unique in that sense.
 
Brwned said:
You're still arguing a different point. Would you say the majority of young, politically active people on the left now would say that they're fed up of their representatives being too nice for too long? Not that they were saying it decades ago, but that as they assess things now, they think part of the problem is that the people that are supposed to represent them didn't represent them well, in part because of a lack of backbone?
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no, the argument against them is that they are corrupt and beholden to their funders and why the left has championed people who don't accept corporate money

Brwned said:
And yes I know there are many people on the left that view many of their representatives as warmongers, thieves, idiots and many other things. Different people have different opinions even in that specific group. But if you were to take a stab at the consensus, do you think there is a consensus that being "too nice" - or whatever synonym you want to put in there - is an issue of their representatives?
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the two most popular left wingers are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Neither is particularly fiery or rude. they're both life long campaigners with leftist economic credentials and their personality has little to do with their success - probably hindering it per polls
 
Silva said:
no, the argument against them is that they are corrupt and beholden to their funders and why the left has championed people who don't accept corporate money

the two most popular left wingers are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Neither is particularly fiery or rude.
Click to expand...

Fair point. Well if you think that the general approach of left wing young people is similar to how Jeremy Corbyn acts, all I can say is I wholeheartedly disagree. I think we'd be in a better place if people were able to follow his lead in many ways, rather than championing his cause while talking to people the way you do.
 
Brwned said:
Fair point. Well if you think that the general approach of left wing young people is similar to how Jeremy Corbyn acts, all I can say is I wholeheartedly disagree. I think we'd be in a better place if people were able to follow his lead in many ways, rather than championing his cause while talking to people the way you do.
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this isn't a leftist thing, it's an internet thing, people don't give a shit about civility on forums when they think the worlds on fire

this might be part of the bubbles you're talking about, you only see left and centre-left internet and you're ascribing particular behaviours that everyone does but the right wing ones get banned from where you go
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
I'm not entire sure what you mean by "affluent decades". If I go with what I think you mean the increased standards of living were mostly the result of long term technological advances that have nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher policies. The Space Race created a lot of foundational technologies and other things like the government-university ARPANET project are the foundation for the entire internet and the trillions of world wide business associated. These things were building for a long time and would have happened even if Democrats/Labour won instead of the right-wing Reagan and Thatcher. All they really did was stand by while Volcker and the monetary policy tweaks fixed the inflation problems and the oil crisis abated. It was more luck of timing that made them seem more prescient than they were. Even the collapse of the USSR had less to do with Reagan than popular myth as it was the long term economic warfare strategy of the US since 1950s to use economic leverage and in general it was the Soviets reliance on natural resources and failure to develop a robust internal economy that meant they would always collapse around this time period.

So nothing about Reagan or Thatcher were actually responsible for any of the technological advancements realized in the 90s/00s. These were all long term developments that were happening when Reagan was still spying on alleged Hollywood communists at the Screen Actors Guild. To get into the details, the history of Silicon Valley shows the combination of factors that were responsible for these 'affluent decades;.

The other flaw with reducing something to an "affluent decade" was already mentioned and that is inequality. Reagan and Thatcher policies directly accelerated inequality and essentially severed as wealth re-distribution from the bottom to the tippity top.
https://scienceleadership.org/blog/reaganomics_and_the_people

daf515bfe.png


Then you have the stagnation in economic mobility which is a very troublesome factor over time as it creates a de facto aristocracy or plutocracy more accurately.

999c60f6b.png


But inequality is just one measure. There are a host of other factors that been intentionally eroded for the average working and middle class: job security, retirement security, protection from losing life savings due to medical emergency, etc. Just a short sample:

  1. Even the Insured Often Can't Afford Their Medical Bills
  2. Fed survey: 40 percent of adults can't cover a $400 emergency expense
  3. Americans’ Confidence in Their Ability to Pay for Health Care Is Falling
Then we have:
Yes, Some Companies Are Cutting Hours In Response To ‘Obamacare’

So while people are technically employed its harder to find a single job that will even hire full time because of the burden. All this started with Reagan (and Thatcher in the UK) to shift the countries further to the right. Here is a great art from 1990 that is still relevant :


https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/17/magazine/a-capital-offense-reagan-s-america.html


Oh I can't leave out the S+L scandal too often forgotten (along with Iran-Contra that isn't as relevant here to econ)



Really Reagan and Thatcher began a wealth grab by the richest pursuing policies solely intended to benefit the richest individuals and most powerful corporations.
Click to expand...

To be clear I’m absolutely not trying to give Reagan/Thatcher any credit for the boom of the 90s/00s. 100% in agreement with you that it was almost entirely down to factors outside their control. In fact that’s the main point I’ve been arguing over the last couple of pages. Societal change isn’t really driven by politics.

Similarly, you could argue that the growth in inequality isn’t politically driven per se. Just a long term consequence of a combination of capitalism and industrialisation/technological advances. Is there a political solution to all of this? Can Corbyn et al somehow put the genie back in the bottle and make the world a better, fairer place? I honestly don’t think so. Time will tell.
 
Silva said:
this isn't a leftist thing, it's an internet thing, people don't give a shit about civility on forums when they think the worlds on fire
Click to expand...

Yes, right wing people do it too. I wasn't arguing otherwise. The conversation is about how the left have changed. The fact the right do it too isn't particularly notable because they didn't have the reputation of being nice in the first place, not because they're not doing it.

So the initial point you made a big issue about wasn't something we significantly disagree on, isn't in any way a big issue, and was mostly caused by a misunderstanding. I find that happens a lot. I'm not sure how you don't see that to be wasted energy.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
To be clear I’m absolutely not trying to give Reagan/Thatcher any credit for the boom of the 90s/00s. 100% in agreement with you that it was almost entirely down to factors outside their control. In fact that’s the main point I’ve been arguing over the last couple of pages. Societal change isn’t really driven by politics.

Similarly, you could argue that the growth in inequality isn’t politically driven per se. Just a long term consequence of a combination of capitalism and industrialisation/technological advances. Is there a political solution to all of this? Can Corbyn et al somehow put the genie back in the bottle and make the world a better, fairer place? I honestly don’t think so. Time will tell.
Click to expand...

Well, I don't think we will ever achieve a perfect world or perfect fairness but that isn't a reason to not try. It's definitely possible to make the system more fair though and that is a goal worth fighting for. I can't really speak about the UK though as all the Brexit stuff I haven't followed nearly well enough to comment.
 
Brwned said:
Yes, right wing people do it too. I wasn't arguing otherwise. The conversation is about how the left have changed. The fact the right do it too isn't particularly notable because they didn't have the reputation of being nice in the first place, not because they're not doing it.
Click to expand...
Lefties are only ‘nice’ if you buy into the ‘liberals always lose’ narrative driven by the right in an attempt to cast anyone remotely distasteful to them as weak, impotent and cowardly.

The left hasn’t changed all that much, it just got buried for a little while when the mass’s attention were focused on social instead of economic issues. We had communist backed labour strikes in the US in 1910s, suffrage movement, labour movement in the 20s/30s, the whole Red Scare/McCarthyism, Civil Rights movement, Vietnam protests, in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Whenever people are mobilized, like they are now, civility isn’t really high on the list.
 
Brwned said:
Yes, right wing people do it too. I wasn't arguing otherwise. The conversation is about how the left have changed. The fact the right do it too isn't particularly notable because they didn't have the reputation of being nice in the first place, not because they're not doing it.
Click to expand...
the left never had this reputation - the "so much for the tolerant left" thing is very recent phenomenon and historical revisionism unless you're mistaking "soft on crime/defence" as snowflakery because that's a different thing. The snowflake criticism started after the recent recession as a response to internet posts about political correctness. Tony Blairs shift to centrism wasn't because the popular culture was paining labour as "too nice" it's because they were painting Labour as communists.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Well, I don't think we will ever achieve a perfect world or perfect fairness but that isn't a reason to not try. It's definitely possible to make the system more fair though and that is a goal worth fighting for. I can't really speak about the UK though as all the Brexit stuff I haven't followed nearly well enough to comment.
Click to expand...

The Brexit stuff is a bit like the Trump stuff. Far left and far right united (paradoxically) to shake up the status quo. Shaking things up is easy though. Actually making peoples lives better is the tricky bit.
 
Silva said:
the left never had this reputation - the "so much for the tolerant left" thing is very recent phenomenon and historical revisionism unless you're mistaking "soft on crime/defence" as snowflakery because that's a different thing. The snowflake criticism started after the recent recession as a response to internet posts about political correctness. Tony Blairs shift to centrism wasn't because the popular culture was paining labour as "too nice" it's because they were painting Labour as communists.
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I'm not talking about snowflakes. I'm aware that is a right wing meme and think it's ridiculous in all but a few scenarios. If you interpret everything through that prism you'll only ever misunderstand the majority of people, because the majority of people don't exist in that world.

InfiniteBoredom said:
Lefties are only ‘nice’ if you buy into the ‘liberals always lose’ narrative driven by the right in an attempt to cast anyone remotely distasteful to them as weak, impotent and cowardly.

The left hasn’t changed all that much, it just got buried for a little while when the mass’s attention were focused on social instead of economic issues. We had communist backed labour strikes in the US in 1910s, suffrage movement, labour movement in the 20s/30s, the whole Red Scare/McCarthyism, Civil Rights movement, Vietnam protests, in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Whenever people are mobilized, like they are now, civility isn’t really high on the list.
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I think that's true to an extent but it is notable that you left out examples of that in the 80s and 90s, which is the period that to my understanding informs the thinking of this particular perception. Not that weren't any of them, but they're more difficult to bring to mind than you examples you raised - and perceptions are influenced by that.

No doubt there was nothing nice about people on the left during the Vietnam war protests and civil rights movement. Between then and now I think there have been fewer of those moments, and the moments have less prolonged.

Whether this perception is a consensus is not something I know enough about. The fact that it makes it into comedy sketches filled with self declared democrats and liberals suggests it's more than just right wing people pushing an agenda though. It might be wrong, but it's not only coming from one direction. And it's not directed at liberal snowflakes but elected senators.
 
The 80s saw a lot of strikes and union busting. The 80s and 90s also saw the AIDS epidemic, during which the left was accused of trying to spread disease by campaigning for gay rights*. The 00s saw 9/11 and subsequent legislation like the patriot act and wars in the middle east, people who opposed this were being called traitors and terrorists.

*Jordan Peterson still does this, often talking about the dangers of promiscuity.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
The Brexit stuff is a bit like the Trump stuff. Far left and far right united (paradoxically) to shake up the status quo. Shaking things up is easy though. Actually making peoples lives better is the tricky bit.
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Why did some on the far left support Brexit? I can't see how that aligns really
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Why did some on the far left support Brexit? I can't see how that aligns really
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They just want to tear the whole thing down and build a socialist utopia from scratch. Brexit could be perceived as the start of that process. I’d imagine that’s the rationale for Corbyn being so complicit in a process initiated to appease the far right of the Tory party anyway.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Societal change isn’t really driven by politics.

Similarly, you could argue that the growth in inequality isn’t politically driven per se. Just a long term consequence of a combination of capitalism and industrialisation/technological advances. Is there a political solution to all of this? Can Corbyn et al somehow put the genie back in the bottle and make the world a better, fairer place? I honestly don’t think so. Time will tell.
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This is a variation on a very orthodox Marxist view of things...
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Yes, really. I'm going with 90s and 00s as the two decades following Reagan/Thatcher. Probably out by a few years, here and there, but was addressing the point that they shifted the paradigm to the right and everyone has been screwed since then. The data you've shown there shows that everyone (including 20th percentile income) had a pretty good time in that era.

EDIT: Although tbf it also shows that inequality got a lot worse from the 80s onwards. Which is presumably the point @Cheesy was making.

EDIT Part Deux: Although it also confirms that everyone is a lot better off right now, in 2018, than their parents or grandparents generations. Make of that what you will!
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But the problem is (at least partly) about a lot more than income and income inequality alone. Materially I'm much more well-off than my parents would've been at my own age. Undoubtedly so. But whereas they were able to find themselves on a mostly upward trajectory (albeit admittedly by working hard) that's not necessarily going to be the same for me.

Job security is a big issue. I might earn a decent amount of money, but having a job you can reasonably hold down consistently is much more difficult now, if not nigh-on next to impossible. Switching jobs multiple times in your career has basically become a given...which is good if you can make it work, but a massively stress-filled, anxiety-inducing process if you can't. Especially in a time where you may be expected to travel on a whim based on your career. And that's before we get to pensions. Or automation, which will further reduce the number of jobs available. Or being able to buy a house, which is much, much more difficult for people in the past irrespective of your income, unless you're rich as feck. And then there's the fact that with industry largely being decimated, often necessarily so due to capitalistic demand, more and more mid-sized towns are often dying on their arses with most young talent being pulled to the city since that's where all the decent jobs tend to be.

That's not to say that all of these problems are necessarily unique, or that previous generations didn't face problems of the same magnitude even if said problems were different in nature. The previous couple of generations lived under the constant threat of imminent nuclear war. They didn't have certain scientific advancements we have now which make it much easier to treat certain health issues and which make connecting with people a simpler process. But by the same token that doesn't strike me as a reason to ignore today's problems, or to sniff at them. It's the same sort of logic which saw United fans bizarrely accepting our various slumps under Moyes/LVG/Mourinho under some distorted logic that we were due a bad period, and that being able to take it without expecting better even though we were obviously capable of better somehow made you a better supporter. Nah, feck that. I'm cynical as feck and tend to distrust people of all political persuasions like yourself, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss a lot of the genuine anger that's being expressed at the moment, or to somehow argue that everything's alright. If there are genuine solutions on offer they need to be enacted, and if leftists need to kind of be dicks about that to make people realise what's needed then that's fair. And I say that as someone who finds the approach of some leftists on here extraordinarily counterproductive at times.

So, yeah. I get what you're saying. A lot of things have improved for a lot of people. But that might not keep on happening, and if it doesn't then the slide might be fairly grim as opposed to a mild one, especially if you factor in things like climate change. I don't begrudge anyone who's passionate enough to actually want that to be addressed.
 
Cheesy said:
But the problem is (at least partly) about a lot more than income and income inequality alone. Materially I'm much more well-off than my parents would've been at my own age. Undoubtedly so. But whereas they were able to find themselves on a mostly upward trajectory (albeit admittedly by working hard) that's not necessarily going to be the same for me.

Job security is a big issue. I might earn a decent amount of money, but having a job you can reasonably hold down consistently is much more difficult now, if not nigh-on next to impossible. Switching jobs multiple times in your career has basically become a given...which is good if you can make it work, but a massively stress-filled, anxiety-inducing process if you can't. Especially in a time where you may be expected to travel on a whim based on your career. And that's before we get to pensions. Or automation, which will further reduce the number of jobs available. Or being able to buy a house, which is much, much more difficult for people in the past irrespective of your income, unless you're rich as feck. And then there's the fact that with industry largely being decimated, often necessarily so due to capitalistic demand, more and more mid-sized towns are often dying on their arses with most young talent being pulled to the city since that's where all the decent jobs tend to be.

That's not to say that all of these problems are necessarily unique, or that previous generations didn't face problems of the same magnitude even if said problems were different in nature. The previous couple of generations lived under the constant threat of imminent nuclear war. They didn't have certain scientific advancements we have now which make it much easier to treat certain health issues and which make connecting with people a simpler process. But by the same token that doesn't strike me as a reason to ignore today's problems, or to sniff at them. It's the same sort of logic which saw United fans bizarrely accepting our various slumps under Moyes/LVG/Mourinho under some distorted logic that we were due a bad period, and that being able to take it without expecting better even though we were obviously capable of better somehow made you a better supporter. Nah, feck that. I'm cynical as feck and tend to distrust people of all political persuasions like yourself, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss a lot of the genuine anger that's being expressed at the moment, or to somehow argue that everything's alright. If there are genuine solutions on offer they need to be enacted, and if leftists need to kind of be dicks about that to make people realise what's needed then that's fair. And I say that as someone who finds the approach of some leftists on here extraordinarily counterproductive at times.

So, yeah. I get what you're saying. A lot of things have improved for a lot of people. But that might not keep on happening, and if it doesn't then the slide might be fairly grim as opposed to a mild one, especially if you factor in things like climate change. I don't begrudge anyone who's passionate enough to actually want that to be addressed.
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Another very good post. You make some excellent points and the fear/uncertainty about the future is certainly tangible. I definitely get that and can't blame people for turning to activism (online or whatever) if that's the only way they feel they can try to secure a better future.

Of course, me being me, I can't turn down an opportunity to bang my "social media is bad mmkay" drum. Because I wonder if all the bad stuff you mention above (lack of job security, pensions, automation of factories etc etc) become a much bigger issue than they really are because people are so immersed in social media? When I was starting out my working life if someone lost their job, or had to relocate at short notice, or can't find affordable accommodation the only people who knew about these dramas would be friends and family. Nowadays we're constantly exposed to tweets, facebook posts and online think-pieces about how incredibly hard life is for young people. In case someone posts a load of stats about how hard life is, I get that these are all real issues but - as you say - there were real - albeit different - challenges faced by previous generations maybe avoided the hyperbole that surrounds them today. For example, we're constantly reminded how hard it is to be a home-owner these days but can you imagine how hard it would be to make ends meet if mortgage interest rates started getting as high as 19% or 20%? That's something my old man had to deal with when he was in his 20s.

Unfortunately, human nature means we're far more interested in horror stories than good news. So nobody wants to hear about how brilliant it is to be able to order whatever food you want, whenever you want it, to watch whatever movie you want, whenever you want, to be able to occasionally work from home instead of slogging into an office every single day, to not have to wear a suit to your job every day, to not be exposed to passive cigarette smoke at your place of work, to buy cheap airline tickets at a moment's notice and all the other mundane improvements in day to day life that previous generations would have been fecking blown away by if they ever got to enjoy them.

Anyhoo. Not sure where I'm going with this, so I'll just conclude by getting back on topic and reminding everyone that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are tiresome bell-ends.
 
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