UK Politics Thread VII: Wake me DUP inside [can't wake UUP]

[Militant Costco]

What?

A child not wanting to go home and a person believing an action to be "morally wrong" are two very different things. While we may consider children of 8 or 10 to have reached the "age of reason", I don't expect them to be able to frame a legitimate argument on the morality of not going home.

How is a child not wanting to go home even relate to morality? There are a lot more criteria's to fill before I can even consider a possibility where the child's stance on morality becomes the deciding factor.

[Neu Leonstein]

This might be useful re what all this customs/border stuff is about: https://twitter.com/hayward_katy/status ... 5233989632

[Questers]

This might be useful re what all this customs/border stuff is about: https://twitter.com/hayward_katy/status ... 5233989632

Yeah it's a nice summary, but it'd be even nicer to see some estimate effects, possibly including both a lowball and a highball.

[Salandriagado]

Yes, it is: freedom of religion does not cover freedom to force unnecessary medical procedures on other people, any more than it covers offering other people up as human sacrifices to your god. The difference between the two is one of degree, not of kind.

Freedom of religion is just a general principle of allowing people to engage in religious practices they choose to - it's up to us to decide what happens when this principle conflicts with other freedoms. You can't just make some positive deceleration that "freedom of religion only extends to x", you can't analyse normative issues in a positivist manner like this.

Yes I fucking can. Freedom of religion is a principle allowing you to practice whatever religion you like personally. It does not cover forcing your religion on other people.

[Salandriagado]

Then the child thinks that their parent is doing something morally wrong. That, as an opinion, is irrelevant. They don't think that the thing that they are being forced to do is inherently morally wrong. I don't know how many fucking times I need to say this before people fucking read it, but that's at least six now.

And what if the child thinks that it's morally wrong to be forced to go home?

They don't think that the thing that they are being forced to do is inherently morally wrong

What?

"It is morally wrong to force me to do X" and "X is morally wrong" are different sentences. I don't know how much more simply I can put this.

[Dooom35796821595]

Theresa May rules out City firms 'passporting' after Brexit

So there we are, we can stop pretending that this won't fuck over the square mile now.

Where did it say that?

[Eastfield Lodge]

What?

"It is morally wrong to force me to do X" and "X is morally wrong" are different sentences. I don't know how much more simply I can put this.

This just sounds like you're splitting hairs at this point. Surely if both are morally wrong, both should be banned, correct?

[Souseiseki]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... SApp_Other

"I’m marching for the hidden history. I’m marching for the women nobody knows about. I’m marching for the women nobody speaks about. I’m marching for the women who suffer in silence. I’m marching to say we hear you." says representative party that thinks women who do things they think are icky should be punished until they do what the mostly male lawmakers have decided is acceptable

[Ostroeuropa]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/04/women-march-in-london-gender-equality-international-womens-day?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

"I’m marching for the hidden history. I’m marching for the women nobody knows about. I’m marching for the women nobody speaks about. I’m marching for the women who suffer in silence. I’m marching to say we hear you." says representative party that thinks women who do things they think are icky should be punished until they do what the mostly male lawmakers have decided is acceptable

Khan donned a “deeds not words” sash and said he was a “proud feminist”.

*smile*
Sometimes it just writes itself, you know?
Proud of what? The deeds? or the words?

[Ostroeuropa]

57 cases of FGM are performed in the UK this past year.
50 of them were legal piercings.
But the statistics office, probably under pressure to hype up some hysteria about FGM, began including entirely legal piercings in their statistics covering "Female genital mutilation", all women counted under this were over 18. (Somewhat surprising to me, as only 50 women in the UK in a whole year got genital piercings.)

Meanwhile, piercings of males are not counted, and nor is outright circumcision, for the figures on male genital mutilation.
In fact, there doesn't appear to be any effort to analyze how frequent the practice is.

Of girls with mutilated genitals in the UK, the overwhelming majority are mutilated abroad, as the UK does not tolerate the practice. compare/contrast MGM.

7 cases of outright castration would bring us up to the FGM figures used for the UK last year, if every single of the 7 cases were of the most egregious forms of FGM (And I remind you, stories about men being castrated often generate audience laughter on womens talk shows, compare/contrast again.)

And then you've got to throw in all the circumcision on top of that, including botched ones, and other types of MGM.

This shows how policy makers and the demands of those who oppose FGM have been incompetent in more ways that one, first by botching the type of law needed to curb the practice, and second by presenting the problem in a gynocentric and sexist way.

A law which arrested and jailed people for having children undergo the practice abroad would be needed, but that did not align with narratives to paint OUR society as hostile to women, and so wasn't pressed for by the campaigners.

[Vassenor]

Because it wouldn't be the same talking about a women's rights march without an immediate BUT MEN ARE OPPRESSED TOO.

[Ostroeuropa]

Because it wouldn't be the same talking about a women's rights march without an immediate BUT MEN ARE OPPRESSED TOO.

When feminists stop trying to suppress mens organizations and marches, it won't be necessary to do so. Men refusing to stay out of sight and out of mind isn't some slight against you, nor does it say anything about them, it merely means they think, with an abundance of good reason, that these are the kind of things needed to get their issues noticed.

Media and institutions entirely ignore or lie and vilify the mens movement. Hijacking womens marches as events in cultural terms is fine with me as a result of that, due to the women on those marches aligning with feminism more often than not. An afeminist or anti-feminist womens march would be a different matter.

A mens march would be shut down, protested, or blocked outright, despite feminists often claiming to be for both sexes.
MRAs merely joining in commentary on the march is a step above the kind of tactics men have to put up with.

You get to have a march.
Men can't even have a group on campuses without many feminists hitting the roof and shouting "BUT MEN AREN'T OPPRESSED TOO!" and shutting it down, with the for realzies woke feminists completely absent from defending the mens group.
Check your privilege, i'd say.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4057239/dani ... ee-speech/

An example of misandry and the extent of it.

But Ryerson’s students’ union argues that the Women and Trans Collective were already dealing with these issues, and that because men have “systemic privilege,” a club like this couldn’t be allowed because it would “harass” women and make them feel “unsafe.”

The ryersons mens issues group had a panel of half women chairs and was half female in attendence rates, by the way.
Here we merely see the feminist compulsion to pretend their movement isn't a trainwreck on mens issues.
"You're already represented by the british government, fuck off sinn fein, we're totally competent and cool and you're a racist if you try to get your own governance going, so begin the crackdowns."
The feminist mindset men have to put up with in institutions. They outright denied men have a right to organize because women and trans people are already doing it, and those men feeling the women and trans folk are insufficient or incompetent at the topic of understanding mens lives isn't acceptable.

But you can't handle "Men are oppressed too?"
You're ignoring context of those objections.

"Men are oppressed too." = "Black lives matter."

Does that help you?

[Myrensis]

On the other hand, I would be perfectly content with agreeing that a child who makes a positive affirmation of a particular faith or lack thereof should not be forced to attend services they disagree with, and this can be phrased in secular terms.

"I am An Atheist, and do not wish to go to church."
"I am A Muslim, and do not wish to go to the synagogue", etc.

That suggests a level of awareness beyond just up and declaring they don't like something, think its unfair, or evil.

Why should that be any different, though? If children cannot be trusted to decide who should lead a country, how can you expect them to make grown decisions over matters of faith? Regardless of whether you think a parent should respect such a request, which is a different argument, why should parents rights be limited in that realm of their child's decision making process but no other? That seems rather inconsistent.

Not sure that's a great comparison, since we don't allow parents to act as proxies for their childrens votes. It's simply a right they can't exercise, period, until they come of age.

[Neu Leonstein]

Yeah it's a nice summary, but it'd be even nicer to see some estimate effects, possibly including both a lowball and a highball.

That's hard though. It's not really something that anyone has any historical samples for, and there aren't really macroeconomic models with the sort of granular detail that could reflect specific customs arrangements. What you have to do is come up with a guesstimate of what that would do to exports, imports, productivity and/or the exchange rate and then feed that through the model. That assumption will never end up really pleasing anyone, and so whatever attempts anyone has made at quantifying some of these effects have been ruthlessly attacked for being insufficiently patriotic. So even if you have to try and come up with numbers for your work, like the BoE or HM Treasury or whatever, you'd try and keep them internal.

The investment banks are happy to keep pumping our forecasts though. Problem with those is that they're really just stabs in the dark, and unless you find a report that specifically goes through the consequences of particular scenarios, what you get is a central projection. Which, at the moment, would be for the UK to fold on most things and broadly speaking stay in the EU in all but name. Call it the one upside of the unwillingness of the public or politicians to engage with any detail - the average voter would never even know!

Where did it say that?

Yeah, I might have missed it, but the article doesn't seem to say it. But she did: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... pean-union

Similarly, on financial services, the Chancellor will be setting out next week how financial services can and should be part of a deep and comprehensive partnership. We are not looking for passporting because we understand this is intrinsic to the single market of which we would no longer be a member. It would also require us to be subject to a single rule book, over which we would have no say.

The UK has responsibility for the financial stability of the world’s most significant financial centre, and our taxpayers bear the risk, so it would be unrealistic for us to implement new EU legislation automatically and in its entirety.

But with UK located banks underwriting around half of the debt and equity issued by EU companies and providing more than £1.1 trillion of cross-border lending to the rest of the EU in 2015 alone, this is a clear example of where only looking at precedent would hurt both the UK and EU economies.

As in other areas of the future economic partnership, our goal should be to establish the ability to access each others’ markets, based on the UK and EU maintaining the same regulatory outcomes over time, with a mechanism for determining proportionate consequences where they are not maintained. But given the highly regulated nature of financial services, and our shared desire to manage financial stability risks, we would need a collaborative, objective framework that is reciprocal, mutually agreed, and permanent and therefore reliable for businesses.

One nitpicky thing: those UK-located banks are currently located in the UK. It's not like they'd suddenly stop lending to the EU - they'd just move their relevant subsidiaries to somewhere from which they can continue that business. It'd cost them money and effort and they'd rather not, and at the margin there will be some business that wouldn't be worth the cost, but if push came to shove for the majority of it they would.

Anyway, will be interesting to see the details in Hammond's speech, but I'm skeptical right now... it seems like the sort of thing where you have to do a lot of work to get it into practical form and even then it still just amounts to a big fat 'no, you can trust us/the reasonableness of the UK voter'. Which a) seems like not the best thing to ask Brussels to do right now and b) is kind of the case for the government's whole strategy: we've campaigned on winning the freedom to diverge in our regulations from your overbearing Brussels ones, but don't worry, we actually will just voluntarily continue following them because that's what British people want. It would be satire if it wasn't so serious.

[Hydesland]

Looks like it's happened again guys...

A man who is critically ill after being exposed to an unknown substance in Wiltshire is a Russian national convicted of spying for Britain, the BBC understands.

[Ostroeuropa]

Looks like it's happened again guys...

A man who is critically ill after being exposed to an unknown substance in Wiltshire is a Russian national convicted of spying for Britain, the BBC understands.

*Sigh*
*unlocks drawer*
*removes tinfoil hat*
*equips*

...
You notice they are giving precisely zero details on the woman, who she was, what she was doing there?
he's an ex-russian spy meeting with ANONYMOUSWOMAN who was also targeted and is poisoned.

She's a british spy, imo, and the meeting was for him to defect or hand over secrets, or he has already done so a number of times and this was one such meeting.
The russians found out, and decided to plug the leak.

It's obvious why there's no details, we can't confirm it because that's leaking shit, but the absence of details basically does already.

The danger is, the reporting makes it seem like russia is being psychopathically stabby for no reason, as opposed to doing something that, well, we'd expect them to do, and we probably do too.

"Russia kills spy and ours before they hand over secrets to our spy." -> public reaction -> "That's the game."
"Russia kills spy, harms woman." -> public reaction -> "Russia is being stabby for no reason on our soil."

I won't entertain the notion of the public not immediately knowing this was Russia.

I did burst out laughing when the BBC reported that an inquiry had returned the result that it was "Probably Putin.". Money well spent.

[Geilinor]

is kind of the case for the government's whole strategy: we've campaigned on winning the freedom to diverge in our regulations from your overbearing Brussels ones, but don't worry, we actually will just voluntarily continue following them because that's what British people want. It would be satire if it wasn't so serious.

May and Hammond are making the only argument they realistically can. They didn't want Brexit in the first place and are trying to manage the fallout without losing their jobs. That leads to them making farcical statements.

[Ostroeuropa]

Incidentally, the fact you can piece together this is probably what happened from the shape of what information is missing is a sign that either our intelligence services don't care very much beyond the basic and compulsory amount of effort, or were incompetent.

There's an entire area of study on how to censor information in such a way that the shape of the holes you leave won't tell a story. This is why the "Almost everything in the document is erased" thing is a trope.

This creates a strange scenario.

Have the british intelligence services just given a nod and a wink to the public? Communicated some information to us in the only way they can while retaining plausible deniability and maintaining protocals of censoring information? ("The Russians Have Attempted To Murder A British Spy, we are moderately successful at infiltrating russian intelligence.")
Or is it that they just don't care, and it's trivial to piece together.

Or they don't think british people can piece it together at all, which loops back round to the; "oh dear, the reporting makes russia look more stabby than is arguably justified."

[Trumptonium]

Theresa May rules out City firms 'passporting' after Brexit

So there we are, we can stop pretending that this won't fuck over the square mile now.

Well that's a shame.

Hoped for a deal.

Unless she's ruling it out to get an upper hand later.

[Geilinor]

Has May lost the plot? She committed to "no hard border" on the island of Ireland and now she's saying that it will be like the US-Canada border. I've crossed that border multiple times and there's nothing soft about it. It involves border checkpoints and armed guards.

[Trumptonium]

Surprised so little talk here about May's housing plan .. which is pretty radical for the Tories.

[Vassenor]

Has May lost the plot? She committed to "no hard border" on the island of Ireland and now she's saying that it will be like the US-Canada border. I've crossed that border multiple times and there's nothing soft about it. It involves border checkpoints and armed guards.

And physically clearing the land along it to ensure it is a clearly marked demarcation.

[Irona]

Has May lost the plot? She committed to "no hard border" on the island of Ireland and now she's saying that it will be like the US-Canada border. I've crossed that border multiple times and there's nothing soft about it. It involves border checkpoints and armed guards.

And physically clearing the land along it to ensure it is a clearly marked demarcation.

The DUP said they will stop the supply and confidence agreement if a hard border is created. May can't do that without collapsing her majority.

[Irona]

Surprised so little talk here about May's housing plan .. which is pretty radical for the Tories.

It just seemed like empty rhetoric to me.

[Ostroeuropa]

Surprised so little talk here about May's housing plan .. which is pretty radical for the Tories.

Telling companies to build more houses or you'll scold them is pretty radical... for the tories... I agree.

Surprised so little talk here about May's housing plan .. which is pretty radical for the Tories.

It just seemed like empty rhetoric to me.

It was.

And physically clearing the land along it to ensure it is a clearly marked demarcation.

The DUP said they will stop the supply and confidence agreement if a hard border is created. May can't do that without collapsing her majority.

Probably irrelevant.
May's best shot is to hold an immediate election on the aftermath of the agreement, before the rot sets in and those kind of problems all explode in her face.