The bigger problem is that a trans people don't even have to do that to gain access to women spaces. A biological male can have his genitals intact and have no hormone therapy undertaken, but if they identify as a woman they can use female changing rooms which is scandalous.
2024 US Election
JD Vance with a very strongly worded speech in Munich. A lot of hard truths there which people need to take on. There is a bit of hypocrisy which he conveniently misses out. He talks about the EU overturned the Romanian election and how Thierry Breton boasts about about they'd do the same in Germany if needed which is obviously about authoritarian as you can get. Unless there is some pretty hard evidence of election interference you can't go around cancelling elections because you don't like the votes. Then again Trump still hasn't accepted he lost in 2020! The migrant crisis from the middle eastern countries I'd argue has come about from American policy. The Americans triggered Article 5 for the war in Afghanistan and if they had left it there maybe we wouldn't have got into this mess. It was imo the war in Iraq literally opened pandora's box and destabilised the whole region and they didn't stop at Iraq. Out of that we had ISIS and this migrant crisis and even now people are suffering.
But Vance is completely right in saying we've got absolutely batshit crazy policies here. Europe needs to get its act together. These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation, which seems to be the popular view among some.
Mirth I did say "if this is correct" but again people going after me for the source but not the actual content which has become common. If what he is saying is wrong I'd love to hear it. I just found it interesting as there has been a lot of talk about the legality of this DOGE and how an executive order would give them this much power. From having a quick google and even running through AI broadly what he is saying is right, USDS was reorganized and renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS).
Gazza M I don't take it personally mate, go as hard as you like 
I've always been able to keep the politics separate, we don't agree and I leave it at that. I have plenty of disagreements here but never hold it against anyone or not respond on other parts of the forum.
flobaba Agreed and I think it is something which has gone wrong in society. Nobody has time or wants to hear the other side. No matter where you stand politically I don't think we should ever take it personally nor should we ever let it ruin long standing friendships/relationships. The thing to realise is these politicians do take their supporters for mugs, on camera they slam the other side but behind closed doors they are usually very friendly with each other.
banduan This is what happens when the so called normal politicians let people down, they look elsewhere. I think most people in the UK know Farage is a knob but his party is pretty much just ahead in the polls, not because they like him but because they are sick of the Conservatives and now Labour.
- Edited
JazzG These populist parties aren't just rising up because of people are stupid and falling for misinformation
"Ordinary people" are rational but they do have incorrect premises. Like anyone is, they're apt to prefer explanations for things that are more reassuring.
In the OECD the domestic wage share of revenue has stagnated for over fifty years, as these nations have unevenly deindustrialised due to globalisation.
The familiar public goods of the post-WWII social democratic wave (like the NHS) were brought about by the mass politics of the labour movement and the need and opportunity of renewal following disastrous warfare. That politics relied on strong unions with high density in the workforce. But those unions relied on the industries that started moving offshore during the era of globalisation, so this way of doing things began to slowly fail.
The first big way this failure emerged was in the union-busting conflicts of the 70s and 80s. Traditionally powerful unions fought rearguard actions against an alliance of national governments with freshly international and mobile forms of capital. They lost.
We still talk about these conflicts now (eg the coal miners' strikes of the Thatcher era or the Australian airline disputes of the 1980s) because there have been few to match them since. The bosses won, and the labour movement's role has been reduced to bargaining since.
In the 80s and 90s, Thatcherism or "third way" politics (pick your poison) brought the managerialist neoliberalism we have now. Centre left parties disaffiliated themselves from the weakened labour movement. Tottering deindustrialising economies were patched up by way of privatisations, credit booms, and the rise of new forms of knowledge and service work.
All through this history, social and economic inequality has continued unevenly to rise. There's no mechanism that keeps it in check now. A gap in living standards has tended to rise everywhere, with degraded relative expectations about welfare, housing, and access to health and education for the majority.
This inequality has been masked by the price benefits of offshoring production, making many everyday goods wonderfully cheap by historical standards, but it becomes impossible to ignore.
By around 2000 "pasokification" (named after the old Greek centre left party PASOK) was in motion. Centre left parties have been getting irregularly hammered at the polls by a rational public increasingly aware of the reduced appeal of its offering. No labour movement, no proper labour parties.
But parties of the centre right are actually worse: all they do is sell things off, abandon helpful economic regulation to attract capital, apply austerity measures to people who don't vote for them, and use tax policy to redistribute overall wealth to their constituency. In effect these parties accelerate system failure.
The last decade's wave of ambiguous populism comes about because these old parties of government are failing. Greater numbers of "ordinary people" are resentfully severed from both sides of the parliaments supposed to represent them. It is highly rational they want new politics that appear to be different.
This new populism has two basic traits: nostalgia and scapegoating.
Its nostalgia harkens back to before globalisation and deindustrialisation. It promises its supporters a powerful phantasm, supported by cherry-picked history, film and photography, of an era when their nations manufactured advanced goods, and everyone was more equal with much fairer access to public goods. It edits out all the bad points, the relative poverty, the racism and misogyny, etc.
Along with this nostalgia come varying stories about who to blame. These go along with fantasies about rolling back social changes of this past half century: women entering the workforce, multiculturalism, etc.
"Ordinary people" prefer not to admit that for fifty years they've been spectating economic changes their withering politics has never been in a position to prevent.
Populists never, ever state that they're not magically in a position to reverse these changes. No one votes for that.
With "ordinary people" and their politicians preferring neither to accept the situation nor be accountable, it becomes a question of scapegoating.
So now it's terrorists, the Chinese, the migrants, the Muslims, the EU ... and now it's affirmative action and trans people wrecking the joint. Even during Trump's political career, the emphasis of blame has changed up a few times.
As the emphasis changes, so too does the symbolic spectacle of "something being done": Rwanda deportation flights, confiscating asylum seekers' family heirlooms at the border, "building the Wall", national enquiries, assassinations and airstrikes ... and now it's purging HR departments of efforts to reduce workplace prejudice.
Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
They have no renewed mass politics, no base in society, and no loyalty to the collective interest. They have no coherent plan and no particular expertise. And since women, migrants, and trans people aren't the problem, punishing and disciplining them will fix nothing.
The populists can "win", but the framework of power doesn't change. A general decline of civic standards leaves the door wide open for unprecedented looting of public goods by capital.
Quite likely the United States federal apparatus is about to get rolled over, ripped off and wrecked in a way that'll resemble the Tory Cabinet feeding their in-laws contracts during COVID-19.
It's also possible some things can incrementally improve, because there's no doubt fifty years of shittifying managerialism have left a fair few easy wins.
I predict we'll hear all about savings and victories through this period, but at its end the US system and its agencies will become even more dysfunctional, half the services they used to provide will be gone, the US will be a pariah in many more multilateral institutions, and nothing will get better for "ordinary people".
When the dust settles on Trump and Musk (or Farage or Le Pen or Beppe bloody Grillo) we're left right back where we were with the other parties. There's no politics here that can check capital and enforce outcomes in our collective interest. Let's hope the new bosses are kind.
Burnwinter Let's be clear. Trump, Farage, Le Pen and other populists have nothing more to offer than the centre left and right figures and parties they're displacing.
Possibly so, do you think people should accept their decline in living standards and just be told to suck it up? Clearly there were policies which were not popular with people. I mean the reason why the Conservative party imo is facing near extinction is they campaigned on enforcing stronger borders and then ended up letting a record amount in legally and illegally. There are perfectly valid reasons to argue that not having this immigration would have made us even worse off than we are now but that isn't what people voted for.
A lot will look to America, I know many have ruled Trump out already but what if, and that is a big if, he does turn things around and there. If not then we are back to square one and someone else has a crack at it. That is how democracy works isn't it?
daredevil A biological male can have his genitals intact and have no hormone therapy undertaken, but if they identify as a woman they can use female changing rooms which is scandalous.
Said it already but I don't believe this is a real tendency or a thing that is happening. Perhaps it is and you have experienced it or someone you know has, I haven't.
I'm not saying it has never happened. But if we're going to argue the toss over the politics of the full social and legal integration of trans identity based on this pathological portrait, we need a clear picture of the scale and degree of the pathology.
If you're going to use words like "scandalous" it's probably on you to give us some clear numbers on cases in which trans women assaulted, harassed or discomforted cis women in shared bathrooms or changing rooms.
I believe these cases are at the margins, both in absolute and relative terms, compared to those cases in which cis men commit assault or harassment against women. But I could be wrong, and I'm open to that.
However, if I'm right, it'd be fair to ask: why the strenuous objections while men's violence against women remains prevalent? Because men propagating "bathroom intruder" discourse would then look like a displacement or projection of their anxieties about that situation.
JazzG Possibly so, do you think people should accept their decline in living standards and just be told to suck it up?
Of course not. The people should rise up and build a collective power capable of taking back control of their conditions.
Trouble is what's happening now is the opposite of that. The "ordinary people" remain disaffected, ambivalent and without unity, and they remain weak.
Whether we like Trump and Musk or not, we don't have control of them. We're enthralled by the show they put on because millions depend on their benevolence.
We've already had one failed term of Trump and the failure of Brexit. Gotta say I'm confident we'll witness the disintegration of this lot plus the rise and fall of several populist variations across Europe before some start to figure out it's a dead end.
And Trump and Elon aren’t the people. They aren’t leading some common man revolution. By the time they’re done, they’ll have just made it easier for those with capital to continue accumulating it.
Trump got rid of US foreign corrupt practices rules. So US companies can come here to Africa and bribe freely. He’s handed over the government finances to the world’s richest man who owes his company’s very existence to the Obama government. He’s assembled the richest cabinet in history. It’s a large scale looting enterprise dressed up as something more noble.
JazzG JD Vance with a very strongly worded speech in Munich
Next president in the US.
- Edited
Claudius aye. populists on the left and right have railed against the influence of money in politics. here we have a situation where things have evolved to a level beyond the corrupt corporate lobbying environment, where big dollar donors are virtually inside the government making executive decisions over public money with no oversight. yet right wing 'populists' are cheerleading it, as are old school law and order conservatives. it only adds to the cult accusations. it feels like the right is on a revenge tour that they've been planning since Nixon was impeached, but never thought theyd have the opportunity to enact. all pretense of principle has gone in the bin, and they've gone completely off the deep end drunk with power.
https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-gov-website-2/
Wow. Clearly Musk and his kids are in need of a DOGS also staffed by 20 year olds, whose only task is continuously red-teaming DOGE.
@JazzG some light reading for you
https://www.profgalloway.com/elon-musk-welfare-queen/
- Edited
Calling spaceX subsidized is extremely stupid. As dumb as Trump's ideas on how imports are subsidies. SpaceX provide a (paid) service to the US which the US can not provide themselves.
The Tesla part of it is more complex, as its subsidies are part of a larger political effort for a "green deal". Same applies to offshore wind, battery production, hydrogen production etc. I think these are stupid policies, as more general incentives-based policies (i.e. carbon tax) are far more efficient.
Kel Varnsen this company is only alive and worth as much as it is because it primarily serves the government which allows it deeply as much capital as it has to R&D. If this was a private sector only endeavour, all funding models would fail. There’s too much time and risk. But government support has allowed it to build a $250bn valuation.
Of course, he earned it. Same with Tesla. We should never look past the fact that he had the boldness and appetite to push these businesses when nobody else would. But in both instances, patient capital from government enabled it. It’s not some heroic effort on his own.
JazzG This is what happens when the so called normal politicians let people down, they look elsewhere.
You mean establishment politicians. And you'd be right, except many had the opportunity to vote for such kinds of politicians and failed to do so.
Like, why vote for Farage when you could've gone for say, Corbin's group or Lib Dems? There's only one real answer to that.
Fucking hell man, this woman really needs to come up with a better example than that.
Kel Varnsen Next president in the US.
Was really impressed when I saw him on Joe Rogan before the election. I don't agree with everything he says but he does articulate himself well, the opposite of Trump in that respect lol.
Burnwinter We've already had one failed term of Trump and the failure of Brexit. Gotta say I'm confident we'll witness the disintegration of this lot plus the rise and fall of several populist variations across Europe before some start to figure out it's a dead end.
As someone who was against Brexit at the time I wouldn't class it as a failure yet. Too early to say anything yet imo. These things need to be judged over a much longer period, it is still very early days. Looking at the EU right now and the way it is in decline getting out probably one the best things that could happen to the UK. Now getting out is the first step but we've then had a complete and utter idiots in charge since then. I think that was my main worry, that we'd leave which was good but then have idiots in charge who would not have a clue about how to get the best out of it!
The main argument against Brexit seems to be economic but when you look at the EU, this logic that we'd be doing much better if we had remained to me doesn't seem sound to me, not like the EU is booming while we are in decline. We are all in decline lol. We've also had a pandemic which has hit us really hard, supply chains got fucked, we gave out loads of money, printed loads of money and then had the Russia/Ukraine war, the combination of all these things sent inflation through the roof and that is the main reason the UK feels poorer rather than leaving the EU imo.
For me the main reason for leaving the EU is we need to be able to hold or politicians to account, we can't do that with the EU. Here the voters were really unhappy with the Conservatives and punished them at the elections, all signs point toward Labour getting similar treatment next time round. When the EU is shaping a lot of your policy you can't really hold EU officials to account. Though many supported Brexit due to immigration and I get that, we need immigration but clearly people felt too many people were coming. After Brexit seems like we got even more immigration than before which basically sunk the Tories and has for some made them near unelectable right now.
banduan You mean establishment politicians. And you'd be right, except many had the opportunity to vote for such kinds of politicians and failed to do so.
Like, why vote for Farage when you could've gone for say, Corbin's group or Lib Dems? There's only one real answer to that.
Corbyn was simply a very disliked politician, a lot of people on the left online love him but in the real world I've never come across anyone who likes him. My wife's family are from the midlands and die hard Labour voters and they couldn't stand him. I'm sure someone will rush here to tell us that it was the smears from the media, I think it is more he was just an unlikeable man with shit policies....As for Lib Dems, they seem to have become the party for the overly liberal Tories lol. Farage right now is selling himself as the non-establishment figure and nobody else is occupying that space. The Tories kept him away and that has worked in his favour, all their failures are not sticking to him and he can batter them on that.
JazzG As someone who was against Brexit at the time I wouldn't class it as a failure yet. Too early to say anything yet imo. These things need to be judged over a much longer period, it is still very early days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
Everyone who claims to be serious about any of the related questions seems to agree it's been a fuckup economically.
Jury is arguably out on whether it's resulted in a long term reduced dependence on nett migration, but it hasn't reduced nett migration to date, which was the implicit or explicit promise of the Leave campaign.
So that'd make it a failure on all fronts thus far.
I am no great fan of the EU though … ever since the eurozone debt crisis it's failed to make the fiscal reforms that would give it credibility as an economic federation.
The EU member nations who get structural economic benefits from its existence (most notably Germany) would have had to agree to a system of direct fiscal transfers (probably via a reformed ECB) to subsidise the others.
They have refused this, which is one reason EU politics have become so perennially fucked up. Makes Maastricht look like an elaborate risk and debt long con in retrospect.
I agree too that the EU is dangerously undemocratic. The way in which Greek and Italian sovereignty was crushed by the Eurogroup during the debt crisis was far more worrying than most of the stuff people complain about though.
Oh dear....
Burnwinter Everyone who claims to be serious about any of the related questions seems to agree it's been a fuckup economically.
I saw a paper recently which suggest otherwise, I'll try and dig it up for you. Short term there will be pain but once we start trading more freely with others over a longer term the benefits could outweigh staying, again that depends on political leadership which we are sorely lacking!
Burnwinter I agree too that the EU is dangerously undemocratic. The way in which Greek and Italian sovereignty was crushed by the Eurogroup during the debt crisis was far more worrying than most of the stuff people complain about though.
I agree. I wonder if elections in Germany and France don't go as the mainstream parties hope what happens going forward with the EU?
JazzG I saw a paper recently which suggest otherwise, I'll try and dig it up for you. Short term there will be pain but once we start trading more freely with others over a longer term the benefits could outweigh staying, again that depends on political leadership which we are sorely lacking!
I think there is always a presumption that the UK will get a good deal but every country will ask for something from us that we won't want to give naturally whether it's the US and allowing their farm produce in so they can outcompete UK farmers or some other kinds of concession there will be a cost and in an increasingly divided world standing alone is not a great negotiating position. Brexit has certainly not made anything better as it stands and I think economically it is currently worse. The whole point of it was to improve the UK's lot but it's certainly failed at that right now.
JazzG As someone who was against Brexit at the time I wouldn't class it as a failure yet. Too early to say anything yet imo. These things need to be judged over a much longer period, it is still very early days. Looking at the EU right now and the way it is in decline getting out probably one the best things that could happen to the UK. Now getting out is the first step but we've then had a complete and utter idiots in charge since then. I think that was my main worry, that we'd leave which was good but then have idiots in charge who would not have a clue about how to get the best out of it!
Do you even know where you stand? Against Brexit…buts it’s not a failure…too early to say…give it time…best thing that could have happened to UK…we’d leave which was good…but have idiots in charge…who wouldn’t know how to get the best out of it. For someone against it you seem fairly pro Brexit there.
The problem with the view that we have idiots in charge, is it overlooks how idiotic the general populace is. They’re the ones who see idiots, vote for them, then expect better. Who are the real idiots? Do you honestly believe we just needed better people controlling it? If so, then who? If you can’t name anyone then I can’t see how you stand beside your point, as it could never be or have been realistic.
- Edited
JazzG The main argument against Brexit seems to be economic but when you look at the EU, this logic that we'd be doing much better if we had remained to me doesn't seem sound to me, not like the EU is booming while we are in decline. We are all in decline lol. We've also had a pandemic which has hit us really hard, supply chains got fucked, we gave out loads of money, printed loads of money and then had the Russia/Ukraine war, the combination of all these things sent inflation through the roof and that is the main reason the UK feels poorer rather than leaving the EU imo.
This is just false, it’s not that we’d be doing much better, it’s more that we wouldn’t be doing as bad. Brexit is a contributory and compounding factor of these issues. The amount of red tape, cost and difficulty Brexit has added in importing and exporting goods is devastating to many businesses. Some of the bigger ones can weather it better, smaller and medium ones have suffered and continue to suffer. I can’t see a position where hypothetical long term gain, which I’m almost certain we will not see, will come. We’ll inevitably converge more with Europe as time goes on, and Brexit will be regarded in the history books as one of the most incompetent suicide attempts known to man, undertaken by a population who should be monitored with safety scissors never mind a pen they can vote with.