Circus circa 2020: Page 91 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Circus circa 2020

Claudius

How would you describe Sweden / Norway, for example? These are business and investor friendly environments, but built on the foundation that no person gets left behind. Even then, state expenditure as a percentage of GDP is still low relative to their southern neighbours because government is small, state-owned entities have been privatised, etc. These are largely good constructs, relative to what we see in places like the US.

jones

They are definitely good constructs especially compared to the shithole that is the US but they're regional phenomena and/or on the wane.

Germany and neoliberal elites all over Europe have been working hard to grind out the social part from social democracy for about 40 years, part of which happened because of your aforementioned privatisation of state owned entities related to public services.

Klaus

jones wrote:
Germany and neoliberal elites all over Europe have been working hard to grind out the social part from social democracy for about 40 years, part of which happened because of your aforementioned privatisation of state owned entities related to public services.

Can confirm that this is exactly what has happened. It's quite striking how privatisation has been behind every single turn society has taken for the worse over the last 20-30 years, whether it's a diminished healthcare capacity or sinking standards of the educational system. If anything good comes out of the pandemic I hope it's a move away from liberal ideas that have hollowed out the welfare state.

Claudius

Is it privatisation or bad contract management that has led to declining public services? So I’ve lived in multiple African countries where services are dire. And people are consistently calling for privatisation in those countries. But if you actually look at most of these situations, there is a combination of governance and capability issues that can be solved regardless of privatisation (and which privatisation itself might not solve if the government doesn’t have requisite contract management and domain expertise).

Mirth

It's because ideology replaced due process. What was a reasonable debate 30 years ago has long since run its course and the pendulum is on the other end of the spectrum now.

y va marquer

Home Alone 2 star Macaulay Culkin has congratulated the efforts of fans to remove Donald Trump‘s cameo.

Responding to a recent surge of social media posts digitally removing the president from a brief scene in the second film in the franchise, Culkin wrote “Bravo” on Twitter to one fan who entirely edited Trump out.

😆

Meatwad

trump struggling to find a lawyer to defend him at his impeachment trial so these guys came to save the day.

Meatwad

so touching ...

Qwiss

y va marquer wrote:

Home Alone 2 star Macaulay Culkin has congratulated the efforts of fans to remove Donald Trump‘s cameo.

Responding to a recent surge of social media posts digitally removing the president from a brief scene in the second film in the franchise, Culkin wrote “Bravo” on Twitter to one fan who entirely edited Trump out.

😆

😆

Mirth

Meatwad wrote:
so touching ...

Fucks sake.

The past 5 years has shown that giving these clowns so much airtime makes them think they are part of something bigger. If the world just laughed in their stupid faces, they wouldn't have anything to cling on to.

Gazza M

Meatwad wrote:
so touching ...

cutting a video like that and posting it on communist twitter will only deserve to divide America further.

Asterix

Apologies if this was posted earlier, but Rudy Giuliani has tried to defend his "trial by combat" comments recently by claiming he was referring to practices in medieval England - he was basing this on Game of Thrones 😆

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]"In an interview with [font=LiberationSerif,]The Hill [/font]newspaper this week, he said he was just quoting Game of Thrones — which he believed was a “documentary”.[/font][/size]

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]He explained he was referring to the “kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England.”[/font][/size]
[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]“When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him,” Mr Giuliani said."[/font][/size]

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/donald-trump-throws-rudy-giuliani-under-a-bus-over-20000aday-fees/news-story/71a122758a07d8449dfaba168114d702
[/font][/size]

Burnwinter

Meatwad wrote:
so touching ...

Mike Davis, who is generally pretty clue-y, thinks that the fractures in the GOP will be irreparable and that the "Trumpists" are now effectively a third party.

Daz

Claudius wrote:
Is it privatisation or bad contract management that has led to declining public services? So I’ve lived in multiple African countries where services are dire. And people are consistently calling for privatisation in those countries. But if you actually look at most of these situations, there is a combination of governance and capability issues that can be solved regardless of privatisation (and which privatisation itself might not solve if the government doesn’t have requisite contract management and domain expertise).

Privatisation and marketisation of those essential social/welfare services is absolutely THE problem. Bad contract management is just a side effect. By extension 'good' contract management would in no way reverse the problematic trends that Jones and Klaus have referred to. They're endemic to the neoliberal rationality driving modern capitalist 'democracies'.

Burnwinter

For the simple reason that "good" contract management for the political and bureaucratic classes is not "good" contract management for the people.

"Good" contracts from the bureaucratic perspective are those specifically designed to diffuse the accountability necessary for democratic service delivery. That removal of accountability is the major incentive for outsourcing and privatisation, not efficiency. These bureaucracies are actually self-limiting when it comes to efficiency. Within production there is always anti-production.

For anyone who is interested in this topic, check out the work of Angela Mitropoulos and Melinda Cooper … Peck and Brenner on "actually existing neoliberalism" are also great. The ur-text is more or less Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", which is quite a prescient document on where we're headed, considering it appeared in 1990.

Claudius

I say “contract management” and governance as an overarching theme. There are a lot of instances where I look at state owned entities in Africa, for example, and there is no governance in place. People will complain that billions are being poured into state owned entities and on the surface that will be true. But beneath the surface, you’ll quickly see that board selection and process is inadequate; the contract between the state and the company is non-existent in terms of the service levels and output levels it is supposed to deliver for the people; and so forth. So the state owned entity just exists as a vehicle to deliver massive projects but is fundamentally incapable of ever performing effectively whether state owned or private because the basic fundamentals of good governance don’t exist.

Likewise, on the side of the state, at treasury or public enterprises, you need to backfill with people who are capable of managing the contracts - ie, ensuring all governance is in place, SLAs are set, etc., irrespective of whether you’re privatised

Meatwad

Asterix wrote:
Apologies if this was posted earlier, but Rudy Giuliani has tried to defend his "trial by combat" comments recently by claiming he was referring to practices in medieval England - he was basing this on Game of Thrones 😆

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]"In an interview with [font=LiberationSerif,]The Hill [/font]newspaper this week, he said he was just quoting Game of Thrones — which he believed was a “documentary”.[/font][/size]

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]He explained he was referring to the “kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England.”[/font][/size]
[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]“When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him,” Mr Giuliani said."[/font][/size]

[size=medium][font=LiberationSerif,]https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/donald-trump-throws-rudy-giuliani-under-a-bus-over-20000aday-fees/news-story/71a122758a07d8449dfaba168114d702
[/font][/size]

says a lot about him that he thinks documentaries can be fictitious.

Claudius

His mind is gone

Burnwinter

The degree to which the overall landscape of US politics has recently been affected by such a high proportion of everyone involved bordering on senility is quite a thing.

Really unconvinced that people over the age of 70 should be in charge of very much at all, and I find it hard to understand why these people can't just retire and enjoy themselves, given they're all filthy rich.

RC8

Burnwinter wrote:
The degree to which the overall landscape of US politics has recently been affected by such a high proportion of everyone involved bordering on senility is quite a thing.

Really unconvinced that people over the age of 70 should be in charge of very much at all, and I find it hard to understand why these people can't just retire and enjoy themselves, given they're all filthy rich.

This is a hugely underappreciated factor in the dynamics that have produced current US politics.

Everyone is either borderline senile or having to collaborate with or stand up to other borderline senile people.

The likes of Trump have always been megalomaniacs, but even by his own standards he was a lot more sensible when he was younger.

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