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PFM politics threads

Joe Hutch said:
For some reason I seem to attract nutters, whether on the bus, train, or just in the street. They fix me with an Ancient Mariner's stare, and proceed to tell me the story of their life (usually an unhappy one), and why it was all the fault of the Masons, their parents, their school, or The Booze.
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...or the neoliberals.
 
sideshowbob said:
Is it just me, or do the regular PFM posters in the music and audio rooms who are contributing to this thread show very strong signs of: (a) a sense of humour (often self-deprecating); (b) a sense of proportion; and (c) strike one as being the kind of people who it would be good to go to the pub with; whereas the members who are almost entirely Off-topic posters come across as more like the kind of people you wouldn't want to sit next to on the bus?
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Tbh I think some of them come across as a little pissy and thin-skinned, far more so here than elsewhere. You quite often hear it said that politics brings out the worst in people but I always assume that participants know what they’re getting into and can take a bit of knockabout. Could be better of course and more inclusive but personally I find it more unsettling to discover that there are loads of people watching the threads closely but unwilling to contribute and silently seething with resentment about the whole thing. Just ignore them, or duck out when they get clogged up and come back later. Anyone getting particularly annoyed about specific ideas or posters is probably having their own politics challenged in a way they’re not prepared to think about.
 
miktec said:
Became almost a guilty pleasure when I first got my bus pass - I would even go to town and back without buying anything in between ....
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Apparently the open top bus that does a scenic tour of the tip of Cornwall disguised as a regular service is full of elderly locals abusing the governments largesse and squeezing tourists out… I’ve yet to partake I should add;)
 
Seanm said:
Anyone getting particularly annoyed about specific ideas or posters is probably having their own politics challenged in a way they’re not prepared to think about.
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TBH I'm not sure it's really about people having their ideas challenged. It's more the pages of long repetitive circular posts. I'm just not sure they achieve very much apart from alienating a proportion of members.

FWIW I don't always agree with your point of view but I've never felt you were talking down to me or being dismissive. I didn't always agree with your posts about lockdown restrictions for example but they did give me pause for thought and I appreciated having a different point of view expressed.

At the end of the day it's just a load of middle aged blokes messing about on a hi-fi forum.
 
Seeker_UK said:
They're getting dangerously close to Israel / Palestine territory, and we know what happened to them.
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Many years ago in internetland I used to visit, and very occasionally post on, the Independent Argument forum run by the newspaper of that name.
It was split up into a range of sub-fora ... the most toxic being 'The Middle East Forum'; toxic being a mild understatement.
The regular threats of violence and doxxing unfortunately started to spill over to less confrontational topic areas (like discussions about TV shows or tennis)

In the end the moderators (and owners) had had enough and the whole shebang was shut down ... shame really as much of it was great fun.
 
Joe Hutch said:
For some reason I seem to attract nutters, whether on the bus, train, or just in the street. They fix me with an Ancient Mariner's stare, and proceed to tell me the story of their life (usually an unhappy one), and why it was all the fault of the Masons, their parents, their school, or The Booze.
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‘My face seats ten, it’s leaving town tonight, be on it’ type o’ thing?
 
Cognisant that PF is primarily a music/Hi-Fi forum, I sometimes post relevant lyrics from my favourite bands to lighten the mood. Recently, for example, I used the Falls song Container Drivers in the Dover; a Myth thread and of course anytime and all the time is a good time to have a reference to HMHB or Dylan.

Regarding insults, I have been called a hypocrite and referred to as ‘gammon’ plenty of times and ‘it would be easier to teach a monkey to play the piano’ for expressing an opinion contrary to the usual gang on here but I don’t mind a bit of argey-bargey. I see Off Topic as the bar in the local so a bit of pub banter is fine with me but I struggle with what is acceptable and what is not. I found this recently in an old Starmer thread following Labours defeat in the Hartlepool by-election - it seems a bit strong to me but wasn’t sanctioned at the time:

Hartlepool has moved on from Brexit and is looking forward to the massive free-port project which is forecast to create 18,000 new jobs - one of the first big benefits of getting out of the protectionist, undemocratic EU racket.
And I suspect the traditional Labour voters there view the metro-woke tossers in London, who run the party, as a bunch of nutters. They probably don't care if there are statues of people who might have had some link to slave-trading 200 years ago. And are horrified at Sir Kneel Starmer jumping on the band wagon of marxist BLM. Starmer may have hidden some of the Corbyn loons in the broom cupboard in Westminster, but until he gets the party to adopt some good old fashioned centre-left policies that the voters in the North can see actually relate to the reality of their lives, rather than the nonsenses of the London set who can afford to worry about irrelevant rubbish, he will continue to spiral ever closer to the plug-hole of political obscurity.

Does it surprise you to learn that it was written by one of the Mods.

All of the recent problems on the political threads have come from one persons epiphany with MMT who, along with three other disciples that he has directed to the site, have sought to squeeze it into every page of every political thread and it has taken most of the fun/interest with them. All IMHO of course.
 
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paulfromcamden said:
TBH I'm not sure it's really about people having their ideas challenged.
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It absolutely isn't that. It's being lectured by humourless types who are absolutely convinced that nobody else knows anything. And I've never yet met a committed Corbynista who can face the possibility they were ever wrong about anything, so there's a level of irony there that's hard not to mock.
 
cutting42 said:
I started a similar thread a year or so back and following that pretty much stopped participating in political threads. I am interested in politics in a minor way and don’t mind f2f discussion but something about Internet forums brings the he worst out in people and myself.

I do read some of them and have read a portion of the MMT threads as they are quite hilarious watching the enlightened ones trying to spread the word. They might be right, I have no idea but suspect it is all a neoliberal plot what ever that is.

I might ask the treasury group at work, maybe they will know about it. Unless they are part of the plot of course.
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You rather prove my earlier point that the issue is not about politics but something about MMT in particular, but you also demonstrate that such hostility is not based on disagreement, a different opinion, or a rational objection of any sort, it is just baseless sneering for it’s own sake. You have said you know nothing about MMT, you don’t even have a contrary opinion, you don’t challenge anything, you just go straight to sneering.

There are any number of issues that get discussed in politics that arouse passions, and those passions sometime spill over into unpleasantness of one degree or another, but they are all based on a difference of passion, a disagreement, a discussion of different points of view that get heated, but here there is none of that, just a straight line from not understanding to passive aggressive sneering.

We have issues such as PR promoted with passion and sometimes anger, but not the sort of line that goes! “I don’t know anything about PR, I don’t want to know anything about PR, but those PRers, what a bunch of (insert sneer)”.

We have Brexit which stirs passions and direct ad hom, but it is based on an opinion, sometimes poorly formed, but nevertheless it is based on a disagreement of actual issues.

The real problem with what has gone wrong on pfm is not with people expressing an opinion and others disagreeing with vary degrees of anger and reasonableness, the problem lies with people unable to formulate an argument against a proposition, so go straight to nothing but unsupported passive aggressive snide and sarcasm.
 
Spraggons Den said:
All of the recent problems on the political threads have come from one persons epiphany with MMT who, along with three other disciples that he has directed to the site, have sought to squeeze it into every page of every political thread and it has taken most of the fun/interest with them. All IMHO of course.
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Really? All the problems on pfm are down to one person? Is that person wrong? Have they expressed an opinion with which you disagree? Do you have a considered argument against any of the content of any of that persons posts? Have you ever even tried to discuss the content of those posts? Have you ever tried to argue against any content? Or is the truth that rather than engaging with content you have consistently followed that person around different threads with nothing except personal insults based on zero knowledge of the facts?

Again, you mention MMT specifically and single out a single member for criticism, but not criticism of anything to do with the subject matter, just another unsupported person attack.

It is a familiar tactic intended to start a pile on and silence discussion of a topic, not with reasoned argument, not even with an anger directed at an issue, just another attack of a personal nature.

You highlight the precise problem in off topic discussions, in that you show no interest in the actual topic, you just want to use it to pursue your own petty personal vendetta.
 
sideshowbob said:
It absolutely isn't that. It's being lectured by humourless types who are absolutely convinced that nobody else knows anything. And I've never yet met a committed Corbynista who can face the possibility they were ever wrong about anything, so there's a level of irony there that's hard not to mock.
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Simply not true, any number of Corbyn supports have freely acknowledged errors. Your posts though don’t seek to discuss error, they go straight to passive aggressive insult.
 
ks.234 said:
The real problem with what has gone wrong on pfm is not with people expressing an opinion and others disagreeing with vary degrees of anger and reasonableness, the problem lies with people unable to formulate an argument against a proposition, so go straight to nothing but unsupported passive aggressive snide and sarcasm.
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Ugly though it is I’d argue it is just a reflection of where politics is these days. We are clearly living through the rise and power-grab of right-wing popularism both here and in America. There is little political discussion beyond tribalism, division and chanted slogans. Look at the state of the current Tory leadership election! The party owners actually had to cancel a debate as the candidates were getting so aggressive toward one another it was damaging the brand.

Look at the state of our mainstream media: there is now little difference between the Telegraph and the Daily Express, the Mail and Sun are what they have always been, the FT is the only one left with any intellect, even the Guardian is hugely diminished. The BBC has been all but destroyed. QT is the Jeremy Kyle show for racist pensioners, Newsnight has lost all its teeth, and soon to be sold-off C4 is now platforming failed GB News presenters. The UK is a political dumpster fire on the edge of a huge explosion. America the same punctuated by an incel shooting up a school or a cop murdering a black guy every week.

In a world populated with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ted Cruz, Boris Johnson, Nadine Dorries, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak as politicians and influencers like Bannon, Shapiro, Lebedev, Farage, Yaxley Lennon, Galloway etc does anyone really expect any intelligent discussion? If so, why? To my mind we do better than most places, though the influx of new ideologues with nothing to contribute on music or audio is shifting the dynamic to my mind, and not in a good way.

pfm is obviously a micro site using ancient internet technology compared to say Twitter where it is possible to heavily curate your own feed to your own mindset. Maybe that is impacting how people see things? It may seem more edgy as more counterpoint is on view without being quoted in the ‘did you see this?..’ way folk you follow cite stuff on Twitter.

Still better than the objectivist/subjectivist or cables thing in the audio room though. That really is so boring as there is never any new information, new framing of arguments etc. It is just recursive. You could code most cable threads in a few lines.
 
These days, I don’t post at all in the audio rooms because I am very happy with my system and don’t want to change it. I have basically lost interest in the equipment side of things. My posting is almost entirely off topic these days. Does that mean I should go away?
 
Tony L said:
Ugly though it is I’d argue it is just a reflection of where politics is these days. We are clearly living through the rise and power-grab of right-wing popularism both here and in America. There is little political discussion beyond tribalism, division and chanted slogans. Look at the state of the current Tory leadership election? Look at the state of our printed press; there is now little difference between the Telegraph and the Daily Express, the Mail and Sun is what they hsve always been, the FT is the only one left with any intellect, even the Guardian is hugely diminished. The BBC has been all but destroyed. QT is the Jeremy Kyle show for racist pensioners, Newsnight has lost its teeth, and soon to be sold-off C4 is now platforming failed GB News presenters. The UK is a political dumpster fire on the edge of a huge explosion. America the same punctuated by an incel shooting up a school or a cop murdering a black guy every week.

In a political world populated with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ted Cruz, Boris Johnson, Nadine Dorries, Liz Truss, Richi Sunak and influencers like Bannon, Shapiro, Lebedev, Farage, Yaxley Lennon, Galloway etc does anyone really expect any intelligent discussion? If so why? To my mind we do better than most places, though the influx of new ideologues with nothing to contribute on music or audio is shifting the dynamic to my mind, and not in a good way.

pfm is obviously a micro site using ancient internet technology compared to say Twitter where it is possible to heavily curate your own feed to your own mindset and maybe that is impacting how people see things. It may seem more edgy as more counterpoint is on view without being quoted in the ‘did you see this?..’ way folk you follow cite stuff on Twitter.

Still better than the objectivist/subjectivist or cables thing in the audio room though. That really is so boring as there is never any new information, new framing of arguments. You could code most cable threads in a few lines.
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I would agree with all of that, but what this thread has highlighted is that when it comes to discussing the economic causes of that (IMO) very ugly right wing trajectory towards austerity and authoritarianism is underpinned by economics, some people respond with a sneering contempt that has nothing to do with the economics being discussed but with personal vendetta. It is noticeable how the personal vendettas come from a few Starmer supporters who cannot argue against the observation that the labour party is following the same economic path that has lead us to austerity and authoritarianism and so resort to personal attacks.
 
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