Inverted

The ERG could have got Brexit today, and at a time when for once there seems some tangible chance of it not happening, they've blown it once again. How many times do the Brexiteers need to reject Brexit before we give up. The vote has been honoured - the government (elected by the people in a fresh election) has to the best of its limited abilities negotiated a way out, and the leading Brexiteers have sabotaged and rejected these efforts.

Noseferatu: Phantom der Nacht 8/10 At first I thought it was a great movie, and loved the visuals and the mood but felt that the acting style was a little weird and dated. I figured that's just 1970s Germany for you. But it seemed odd since I've seen Bruno Ganz deliver an extremely realistic and intense performance in Downfall and he just seemed too different. Now on second thought, I realise the acting from the three leads was probably purposefully meant to evoke the really exaggerated silent film acting like in the original Noseferatu. Overall it's a brilliant effort at updating an iconic silent movie into a disturbing and interesting modern film, without losing all the characteristics of the original.

I read everything here in my own voice except for @SirBalon who ofc sounds like this

Not a big fan of Locke funnily.

I can't for the life of me work out what this post means. Like even any one of the three sentences in isolation.

So we're all bound by an outdated and corrupted vote two years ago, and the Tories are absolutely bound by manifesto promises from a year ago, but we just have to accept whatever Prime Minister they pick out out of a constantly shuffling deck of posh racist freaks without a new vote?

A bit disturbing to hear Brexiteers taking their position out of Anders Breivik's manifesto. This is Nazi rhetoric right out of the 1930s, except they called it "Cultural Bolshevism". Not long after the senior Tory Brexiteers called themselves the Grand Wizards. They're not really trying to hide it are they.

I agree that some kind of a recession is inevitable but going into a No-Deal scenario and going into a recession bordering on a depression benefits absolutely nobody except the small cabal of Brexiteers. The leftist priority should be to protect public services and to facilitate job creation. Even with a Corbyn government, No Deal would be the worst scenario by those criteria. No Labour policy is at all impeded by EU membership. The EU is a neoliberal institution by origin but nonetheless it is useful. Even as a Marxist, to me the point should always be to pick the progressive option, and right now the EU is the progressive option. Brexit can only by definition be a regressive step. Look around the world - where are the well-functioning social economies? Almost all in the EU, or extremely closely associated with it. If we were at a Denmark or Finland level, then I'd say it's time to start thinking about the constraints of the EU, but whilst we still have so much space to improve within the current framework, our priority should be reforming our internal problems and then looking outward. I agree that the EU has done absolutely reprehensible things but even then, it doesn't always need to be the EU of Wolfgang Schauble. The EU merely gives expression to the consensus of the major nations - all it takes is a wave of serious social movements to emerge in Germany, Britain and France, and the nature of the EU would change substantially.

It's impossible for anything to be binding really because essentially anything can be done by a Parliamentary majority. You could write in the Act establishing a certain referendum "this referendum shall be binding" and then the next day, if a few votes swung in the Commons, Parliament could delete that sentence. In fact it probably wouldn't even need to do that because if Parliament chose to ignore the result, there's no way of taking it to court to force it to do something. It's the same where a few years back it was written into law that the Scottish Parliament is permanent, which is meaningless because if a majority in the Westminster Parliament ever decided to abolish the Scottish Parliament, that line would have zero legal effect. Despite the massive network of conventions and competing legal systems in Britain, the only real constitutional rule is that Parliament can theoretically do literally anything. It can make any decision, break any other existing law, and nobody can override it, nor can it bind itself to any course of action.

We're one of the most unequal countries in the developed world. One of the least socially mobile. We have the wealthiest region in Western Europe and several of the poorest. Our wages have been stagnant for a decade. Our government spending as a proportion of GDP is one of the lowest in large European countries. Our child poverty and homelessness rates have soared. Our benefits system has been "reformed" into a intentional system of punishment and humiliation designed force people into insecure work which is basically not liveable. If wealth and resources were really being distributed effectively in this country, we wouldn't have hordes of uneducated thickos living in unimaginably grim post-industrial shitholes, scraping a living on poverty wages, who are so desperate and lacking in critical faculties that you can convince them that Nigel Farage is their savior.

History shows that the real turkeys are the wealthy who turn a blind eye to the society around them disintegrating and who think they'll be guarded from the consequences. Voting for wealth redistribution is the best self-defence mechanism the wealthy ever came up with.

Lib-Dem and Green too, lets be fair. Maybe some cheeky TIG supporters in there as well.

Congrats to May on somehow uniting the unions and the business owners against her.

I don't blame Remainers for being obstructive because that's the inherent risk of allowing a single tiny majority to make a huge change. The process should not have been allowed to begin without a clear and overwhelming expression of support for it, because it's just too difficult to do otherwise. As it happened, it passed on the basis of a cheated vote with a very slim majority, a large proportion of whom were elderly. And then to make things even worse, rather than acknowledging the extremely weak mandate and reaching out, the Tories immediately took us down the path to an extreme approach because of May's xenophobia and hopes of winning over the ERG.

I'm now coming to think No Deal is really going to happen. Quite hard to stomach.

Don't need to ask for opinions - look at the signings made under him everywhere he's been for the last 5-6 years of his career and you can objectively see he's an absolute conman. If he leaves, he leaves us needing to shift about half a squad in deadwood on top of having to replace an army of loan signings. But thank God he's leaving us in time for someone hopefully to come in and implement a half-sensible transfer policy.

The Dependent Group.

Leave the Labour party due to racism. Have 1 in 7 of your MPs make racist statements. There is only one solution: there must be a new splinter group to reject the original splinter group's descent into racism.

Apparently they've been working with a consultancy in Washington and will be targeting marginals in the next election, rather than try their luck fighting to keep the safe seats the Labour Party provided to them to allow them to establish their careers. The centre being the usual bastion of moral fortitude as they have been for the last hundred years.

I've read The Master and Margarita so I'll decide this matter in due course. I also got about a 1/3rd of the way through War and Peace when I was 16 - wonder if I'll ever get round to it again.

Just got past the 50-page mark with this. I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected, for some reason I was thinking it would be much slower than it turns out to be.

The Great Divide is a collection of essays as opposed to a cohesive book so I've paused on that and decided to read some fiction again. Just finished this: Just a stunning, horrifying, gut-wrenching book. Possibly the first book that's ever brought me to tears.

Tbf Sandro and Schneiderlin were quality players who just for some reason didn't really work at Everton.