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PFM politics threads

NeilR said:
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?
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Yeah, off you pop.
 
NeilR said:
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?
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Not at all and I hope I didn’t give that impression. There are many in off-topic who have a very long connection with the site, who we all know and have an understanding of their audio and music journey and they will never be anything but welcome. These people are the site.

I’m just a little suspicious of those who arrive from nowhere to post many very long posts on often outlying political theories with no discernible interest in the core scope of the site. Why would someone join a hi-fi and music forum to do that?
 
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! 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 printed press; 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 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. 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.
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A separate response to your post is an observation that we both agree with everything you say above. You believe passionately that PR is a solution, I believe equally passionately that economic lies are the cause. But I don’t ever see anyone posting along the lines of, “PR eh? I don’t understand it, I don’t get it, I have no interest in it, but those PR supporters, eh? What a bunch of tossers, eh? Tee hee hee”

You might get push back, some of it from me, but it is on the issue itself, it is a disagreement of the substance of a disagreement.

We have seen a couple of posts just in this thread that single out economic opinion not as a problem, not because of any matter of substance, not as a matter of differing opinion, but as a topic that must be silenced.
 
Tony L said:
I’m just a little suspicious of those who arrive from nowhere to post many very long posts on often outlying political theories with no discernible interest in the core scope of the site. Why would someone join a hi-fi and music forum to do that?
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Because they want to save us. I bet the guy who only talks about himself in the third person and his oppo are all over loads of internet forums doing the same thing as they're doing here. They're on a mission.

There's a long tradition on the traditional left of reducing everything to simple binaries, and this one - MMT (the small tribe who have embraced the light) vs. Neoliberalism (literally everyone else) - is merely another one.
 
ks.234 said:
A separate response to your post is an observation that we both agree with everything you say above. You believe passionately that PR is a solution, I believe equally passionately that economic lies are the cause. But I don’t ever see anyone posting along the lines of, “PR eh? I don’t understand it, I don’t get it, I have no interest in it, but those PR supporters, eh? What a bunch of tossers, eh? Tee hee hee”
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PR is a very simple thing to get across. It is just functional democracy. You vote, your vote is counted, your vote is represented. That is it. Totally different to FPTP. Obviously there is a huge amount of push-back against it as the Tory establishment know it will finish them as they have never had a legitimate mandate for rule in history. It is also very widely adopted across the world so not frightening or radical in any way.

MMT economics is at odds with the economic orthodoxy of every political party in this country. There are no practical examples to cite. It is a new theory and one I find interesting and quite logical within my limited understanding, but its advocates have a simply massive hill to climb from where we are right now. PR looks attainable in comparison as the arguments are simple and it is a proven concept.
 
sideshowbob said:
Because they want to save us. I bet the guy who only talks about himself in the third person and his oppo are all over loads of internet forums doing the same thing as they're doing here. They're on a mission.

There's a long tradition on the traditional left of reducing everything to simple binaries, and this one - MMT (the small tribe who have embraced the light) vs. Neoliberalism (literally everyone else) - is merely another one.
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What is MMT? Who are you talking about? I really don’t understand or recognise your observation.
 
sideshowbob said:
Because they want to save us. I bet the guy who only talks about himself in the third person and his oppo are all over loads of internet forums doing the same thing as they're doing here. They're on a mission.

There's a long tradition on the traditional left of reducing everything to simple binaries, and this one - MMT (the small tribe who have embraced the light) vs. Neoliberalism (literally everyone else) - is merely another one.
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You clearly do not understand either MMT or neoliberalism. Your assertion that MMT and neoliberalism are binary opposites is just factually wrong.

But more relevant to this thread, you highlight the real cause of the issue of unpleasantness in an off topic thread where you do not address the topic, but instead attack the poster, and not on the grounds of anything he has said, but a personal attack on his style of posting.
 
NeilR said:
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?
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I feel the same, Neil. I see no need to spend money on changing my DAC/RPi, 72/hi/250 and KLS3’s given I have developed a hearing problem.

The cable threads descend into argument within a few posts.

I am interested in diy though and while I will give things a go I don’t have the expertise to contribute/advise in the diy threads but I’ve learned a load here.
 
MVV said:
What is MMT? Who are you talking about? I really don’t understand or recognise your observation.
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Look back through any of the recent politics threads and you'll find a small group of people banging on about MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) in every thread. Which I guess is why @paulfromcamden started this thread. I'm surprised you've managed to miss it all.
 
I’ve looked it up on that Google. I look in most days and clearly missed it all. Or ‘it all’ wasn’t very much at all.
 
Tony L said:
MMF economics is at odds with the economic orthodoxy of every political party in this country. There are no practical examples to cite. It is a new theory and one I find interesting and quite logical within my limited understanding, but its advocates have a simply massive hill to climb from where we are right now. PR looks attainable in comparison as the arguments are simple and it is a proven concept.
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Again, I agree with all of that, but my point is that, as has been demonstrated very clearly in a number of posts here, MMT is attacked not on any ground of substance, of argument or difference, it is attacked just with passive aggressive sneers and personal insult
 
Tony L said:
MMF economics is at odds with the economic orthodoxy of every political party in this country. There are no practical examples to cite. It is a new theory and one I find interesting and quite logical within my limited understanding, but its advocates have a simply massive hill to climb from where we are right now. PR looks attainable in comparison as the arguments are simple and it is a proven concept.
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What would it look like to “attain MMT”? Just an increase in public spending for public goods? Truss? As far as I understand it MMT isn’t a policy - it’s a conceptual system for explaining the effects of policy decisions. It doesn’t prescribe anything.
 
It should be noticed that MMT has not been brought into this thread by any MMT supporter. They complain about MMT a being everywhere, then drag it into a discussion so they can bang on, again, about it being everywhere.

It has been brought in by precisely the people who have been using personal insult to attack MMT posters. The people who not once have ever been able to respond to the substance of anything said, who have not be able to formulate an opinion on the subject matter, who do not have a disagreement with the issues, but who *only* attack with personal insult.
 
mandryka said:
What would it look like to “attain MMT”? Just an increase in public spending for public goods? Truss?
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This has been discussed at length elsewhere, and I don’t want to go on about the finer points of MMT here, but the short answer is an emphatic no.
 
mandryka said:
Just give me a link to where if you have time.
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As you’ve asked I will reply here as briefly as I can. First of all, despite all the heat and smoke, MMT is not a ‘thing’, it is not an ideology, it is at heart an observation that neither taxes nor so-called borrowing fund government spending. It is an observation derived from the logic that a government such as ours is it’s own currency issuer and cannot therefore run out of the thing that it issues. Truss et al, claim that spending on public services have to be cut because that spending is constrained by income from tax and there isn’t enough money to go around. MMT says that while there are many real constraints on government spending, tax is not one of them. MMT is not therefore something to be attained as much as a description of actual money flow as it happens here and now

Might be better to continue this in Tory Runner and Riders, happy to address any questions there to the best of my limited understanding.
 
Brian said:
I am interested in diy though and while I will give things a go I don’t have the expertise to contribute/advise in the diy threads but I’ve learned a load here.
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Please never let that stop you! To my mind many of the best threads on the site (and the internet in general) are very obviously learning curves with folk embarking on projects often far beyond their current skillset or knowledge and documenting that journey, their mistakes, progress, eventual completion etc. I certainly take this approach, e.g. I’m currently restoring a mid-60s Tektronix valve oscilloscope. I haven’t the slightest bloody clue how an oscilloscope works, I barely know how to use one, yet there is a five page thread in the classic room documenting my progress and the help I’ve received.
 
ks.234 said:
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.
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You keep repeating people become angry at the subject of MMT.

I disagree. People are fed up of the subject appearing across multiple threads where it is not relevant to the discussion, and also the manner of it. It is not a reaction to the subject itself.

ks.234 said:
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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I believe the hard left faction here include me as a Starmer supporter, however, I can assure you I know exactly what Starmer is and also Labour. This is why I have not argued against the notion Labour is following a similar path, I know it is. I just want the tories replaced at the next GE.
 
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