wulbert
pfm Member
"Boris the Billionaire's Bitch" on Double Down News, YouTube
WTF is happening to the UK?
- Thread starter foxwelljsly
- Start date
Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
From my POV and apologies in advance for a bit of a scattergun contribution.
It's not the UK. It's the World. Or at least, it's what it seems like to me.
Well, when I state that, maybe the world isn't going to s**t. Maybe the reasons it seems that it is, is because:
It's not the UK. It's the World. Or at least, it's what it seems like to me.
Well, when I state that, maybe the world isn't going to s**t. Maybe the reasons it seems that it is, is because:
- I was born post-war to 'boomer' parents and have only known a very unusual period of global history; during the best time that the planet will ever have and its rebalancing. No wars, and improved healthcare / longer, better, healthier, more comfortable lives with enjoyed by each successive generation becoming the norm.
- We are bombarded by more information than ever before. Not just more of it but unfiltered, or in some cases just plain wrong, designed to cause upset and unsettle. Previously, a lot of how awful the world is would never have made it to my newspaper or the nine o'clock news. Oh, and the press likes to always peddle f**king misery.
- Many of us have lost our support networks. I am exposed to the mass of this stuff and limited means to discuss / rationalize / deal with it.
- We are genetically predisposed to pessimism. Our ancestors who expected the worst, lived longer.
- Maybe it's my age. I'm in my 50s and my world is disappearing / shrinking, childhood constants are going (including people, people keep dying), I can feel age creeping up on me (I hurt and ache a lot and I now finally see my dad in the mirror) and is already putting me in an unhappy place, scared for me and my partner and our future.
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palindrome
Thru a hedge, backwards and forwards.
Well said Seeker. I've thought about posting something along similar lines for a while now, but knew that once I began articulating my thoughts, I/you/fishes would end up with a bloody essay on the matter! (Phew.)
I'm 64, and 'will you still need me, will you still feed me. . .' is a lyric that has taken on a whole new and unsettling bunch of connotations and implications as the Tory Scum continue to push the UK into a neo-fascist state.
John
mandryka
pfm Member
Read it now. What it's helped me to see is that the the sort of authoritarianism present in a country isn't solely, or even primarily, a matter of laws. It's a question of how the laws are used -- in this case, to create a "hostile environment" Thanks again.
Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
I've always been a bit of a miserable get, so maybe a sense of fatalism, tempered with a sardonic sense of humour, helps me cope with all the shite that's going on.
I remember my late mother saying, at the time when I was in my late teens and she was almost fifty (so early 1970s), that she 'wouldn't want to be young these days'. This despite the fact that her own youth had been spent in the shadow of the Great Depression and her late teens had seen the outbreak of WW2.
I never expected life to get easier, or happier as I grew up. It's been more of a rollercoaster ride, with easy times alternating with struggles, but with no particular pattern depending on my age at the time. From a purely personal point of view, my life improved immensely when I retired, almost ten years ago now, and, touching all the wood I can find, has stayed good ever since.
PS Here are Sydney Smith's recommendations to a female friend who was suffering from 'melancholia'. Most are still useful/relevant today:
'Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done, so I feel for you.
1st: Live as well as you dare.
2nd: Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.
3rd: Read amusing books.
4th: Take short views of human life – not further than dinner or tea.
5th: Be as busy as you can.
6th: See as much as you can of those friends who like and respect you.
7th: And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
8th: Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely – they are always worse for dignified concealment.
9th: Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
10th: Don’t expect too much from human life – a sorry business at the best.
11th: Compare your lot with that of other people.
12th: Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.
13th: Do good and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
14th: Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
15th: Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.
16th: Struggle little by little against idleness.
17th: Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
18th: Keep good blazing fires.
19th: Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
20th: Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana.
Very truly yours, Sydney Smith.'
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robs
should know how this works by no
For anyone feeling sorry for themselves, imagine how Mr Shaw is feeling now...
https://www.theguardian.com/society...om-neck-down-not-eligible-for-night-time-care
Makes my blood boil.
https://www.theguardian.com/society...om-neck-down-not-eligible-for-night-time-care
Makes my blood boil.
Seanm
pfm Member
I think there’s a lot in this and it’s why I think there’s also a lot in what Woodface says about not taking things too much to heart. Public life has become unusually toxic - I mean it’s been intentionally poisoned - at the same time as we’ve been granted an unusual degree of access to it. That would be disorientating enough, but we’re also obliged to deal with it in a very individualised way, without much support from institutions like unions or churches, or from public figures, most of whom seem to be implicated in the general toxicity. Under these circumstances you sort of have to improvise whatever means of dealing with it all that you can, because the culture at large hasn’t really equipped us with the tools to manage it in an optimal manner. Total withdrawal from any kind of public life isn’t an unreasonable response IMO, at least temporarily.
wulbert
pfm Member
I think "unsettled" is a good word. I find it profoundly depressing to see a greedy, boorish, sociopathic clown like B.J. in charge of our country. It induces nausea and disbelief to see him in number 10.
Knowing that those at the top have absolutely no interest in our wellbeing and are simply helping themselves is profoundly unsettling. Untethered is how the country feels to me. I imagine it might be the way that children feel in a household where the parents are alcoholics or drug addicts.
Leaders who show utter disregard for their populations often end up swinging from lamp posts or being shot in small, concrete buildings. They don't seem to be able to self-regulate.
robs
should know how this works by no
Uh Oh....backed by the treasury apparently....this is going to be the s^&tstorm to end all of them...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61826209
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61826209
paulfromcamden
Baffled
I spend rather a lot of time online and have come to realise that's not a necessarily good thing. As @Seeker_UK states, what would have once been a column inch in the paper about some poor sods thousands of miles away can be all over social media with dozens of clips of uncensored phone footage. Our caveman flight/fight brains haven't evolved to realise it's not about us and so we soak up the stress.
I'm sure this is a factor in how people behave online and it reminds me of a book review headline in the FT a while back - 'When Did Everyone Become So Mean?'
I try and remind myself to not be mean online. I find myself increasingly deleting PFM posts because I realise they're mean spirited.
Some excellent, thought provoking posts in this thread.
Ponty
pfm Member
The only apparent solution to a debt problem is more debt. The only way it can be improved is to make it interest free (with taxpayers footing the bill). What could possibly go wrong…
Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
One of the issues of communicating online is that in many cases you are conversing with a name / avatar with whom you have never had any real interaction with and so makes it easy to forget it's a human being with more facets than the one opinion you disagree with. How may time have we lost our s**t with some random call centre person? Easy without knowing them; saves all that pesky empathy stuff.
Seanm
pfm Member
Yes, although bear in mind people have been saying exactly this since the dawn of mass media. I do think that what’s special about the current moment is less the step change in the amount of information we’re exposed to than the fact that it coincides with a particularly awful moment in public life. The FT and other serious newspapers are not at all innocent in all this which is the main reason we see so many articles about how awful social media/the public/“we” all are. That’s a very convenient explanation for where we are, for journalists who’ve spent decades promoting austerity, xenophobia, right wing demagoguery etc., and working very hard to hobble any political alternatives.
Marchbanks
Hat and Beard member
I think those quotes sum up my position fairly neatly. I stopped reading newspapers over thirty years ago, but have extended that over the last few years to all news sources - radio, TV or internet - and in the last twelve months to virtually all television broadcasts. I’ve never gone near Twitter. Occasionally I’ll pick up on the odd story when I’m hunting for the BBC weather forecast, stray onto a political thread here (because half of them turn into one eventually) for as long as it takes me to mutter ‘oh, shut up’ - approximately three posts - or hear something from a friend or neighbour that I know I need to follow up for personal reasons (eg Covid restrictions.) At first I was concerned that it was a cowardly head-in-the-sand cop-out, but the bottom line is that my not being totally aware of things that are happening in the world makes absolutely no difference to anyone else. That may not be a good thing, but it is a fact.
Although it is extraordinary how much information still filters through, I can honestly say that the last couple of years have been among the least stressful of my life.
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
I blame it on the printing press.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
Watch what happens in the two by-elections- substantial numbers of people, knowing what we all do now about Johnson and his cabal, will go out and actively vote for them.
mandryka
pfm Member
Why do you think they’ll do that? I mean, obviously there are going to be lots of reasons, but I wonder if you have a view on what the main reasons are. Do they know significantly less about Boris than you do, so their vote is uninformed? Or do they know enough but still think that the conservatives are the best for the job? And if so, how did they arrive at that valuation - what influenced them?
Sorry, this sounds like the Spanish Inquisition.
Anyone reading your contributions to this and other threads would think it’s impossible for rational free moral agents to vote Tory. But here we are, contemplating the possibility that they will on 23rd. So there’s a disconnect between them and you which it would be interesting to account for.
Spraggons Den
pfm Member
Yes, remarkable in light of his record as PM but I think the Tories benefit from having a higher "core" vote than the other parties. This is partly down to demographics - the boomers are now (like many on here) property owners, have retired and want to go on foreign holidays/luxuriate in three high end record players - they believe they have worked hard for their gains, feel threatened when politicians want to redistribute their wealth and are prepared to put an X in a box every four years or so to ensure the situation remains unchanged, shrug their shoulders and mutter 'Thatcher was right, there is no such thing as society'.
We also have to remember that Labour are trying to bounce back from an historically bad defeat at the 2019 GE.
We also have to remember that Labour are trying to bounce back from an historically bad defeat at the 2019 GE.
wulbert
pfm Member
I've pondered this question before now. It is rarely the answer to any situation in real life that "they" are all stupid and ignorant and "we" are all clever and informed. Life isn't like that. People aren't like that.
Maybe it is a question of priorities; The "immigrant problem" could be a high priority for many people and Boris isn't afraid to sort it out and be tough. He "got Brexit done" and many are grateful to him for that and will overlook his bad behaviour. Maybe in this "dog eat dog" world it makes sense to have an absolute cnut batting for your side.
I do find it hard to fathom. I look at Johnston and can not see any quality that makes me think he has my interests, or the interests of any working person, at heart. Other people must see something different; he will protect my wealth, he likes the stuff I like; beer, cricket, banter. He's jolly and positive.
Let's not underestimate the influence of the popular press in influencing people's priorities and outlook. Would billionaires buy newspapers and broadcast media if it did not protect their interests? Most people just want a quiet life and a simple explanation for how life works. They will get that from Johnston.
Jeremy Corbyn and the lefties were going to take away people's gardens, make friends with terrorists, create a communist UK, have unionism and strikes, power cuts like the 70's etc etc. Boris and the Tories saved us from all that.