The resignation of Savid Javid yesterday as Chancellor without even presenting a budget mirrors the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father – and in so doing says something extraordinary about lack of social progress in the UK in the intervening 130 years.
Chancellor Randolph Churchill disagreed with then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury over his first budget, and resigned. The whole spat was carried out in a splenetic and emotional fashion which was almost certainly influenced by Churchill’s mental deterioration from syphilis – which the Eton and Oxford educated Randolph had caught as a result of a Bullingdon Club jaunt.
(There is no evidence a pig was involved. There is also no evidence Winston had congenital syphilis, or that Jennie Churchill caught it from Randolph, the latter being slightly surprising).
It is to me quite incredible that the UK is still at the mercy of the whims and foibles of degenerates from not only the same class, but from within the same tiny social institutions which still confer a hereditary ability to govern a state of 60 million people now, in 2020. It makes a mockery of the UK’s claim to be a functional social polity and it makes a mockery of the very notion that “democracy” has any real existence in British society.
Johnson’s drive to centralise power is not especially different to that of Thatcher or Blair; there is a slight qualitative difference in the degree of Cummings’ policy influence, but to date I regard the claims that there is a real discontinuity in the form of UK government as overblown. Westminster has always been the seat of a massive, centralised abuse of power; perhaps it is a little bit more visible at the moment. What has enabled the continuation of oligarchic hegemony in the UK has been the destruction of the power to resist of organised labour. Thatcher quite deliberately undertook that as a massive project of social engineering, involving the deliberate destruction of all the UK’s major productive industries and replacement by a service based economy.
Blair continued the Thatcher revolution, in particular in removing government services to private providers where organised labour was weak or non-existent. The massive concentration of wealth into the hands of the rich and removal of wealth from ordinary people that ensued from the Thatcher/New Labour right wing revolution led to the reaction of Corbynism, but the roots of organised labour having been ruthlessly cut away, Corbyn found there was no longer a sufficient well of social solidarity which could support a counter narrative to the massively concentrated media propaganda.
Wealth inequality is fast heading back to levels Randolph Churchill would have recognised as he and his Bullingdon boys went whoring working class girls in Oxford. The gap between the top 1% and the 99% is shifting apart radically and is the key measure- not the gap between the 10% and 90% which the government points to disingenuously as not changing much.
Notions of social solidarity which made so much progress from 1800-1980 have gone backwards and their survival in isolated areas as a majority view is primarily as expression of national or cultural identity, notably of course in Scotland but also among immigrant groups and in cities with a strong sense of identity and civic pride. Outwith that, the UK has been engineered by unscrupulous politicians to revert to a society which delights in licking the shoes of the man from the Bullingdon Club.
Remind me, which century is this?
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A petition is calling on Boris Johnson to sack Andrew Sabisky.
I had already read Sabisky’s 2014 comment on Dominic Cummings’s blog, but mistakenly remembered it as written by Cummings himself. One line that stood out was the assertion that if widespread eugenics is delayed for a while in the west, the western rich will whizz off to Beijing or Singapore to get “smart” embryos chosen.
Video of Andrew Sabisky standing against a background of marching soldiers and flapping Union Jacks, calling for trebling military spending – and looking as much of a cartoon character as Milo Yiannopoulos.
He’s just resigned. Off to do important things (whore for the MIC?). Self regarding little twat. Should try his luck State side. Washington luv his type.
Here he is on the BBC, “debating” his idea of trebling military spending. How does someone get a gig on the BBC to talk such total cr*p? Who is this guy? I know he’s the grandson of Christopher Brasher, but…I’m wondering whether there is some kinda network around Dominic Cummings that goes back to his days ast the DoE working with Michael Gove. Sabisky has hauled himself around the “education” conference scene…
Fuckwith marxist explaining why his best mate Cummings has sacked a fellow fascist. YCNMIU
Sabinsky wasn’t sacked, he resigned. At the very least, he was ALLOWED to resign. Not like one of Javid’s unfortunate SPADS who was forcibly ejected (for the crime of having two mobile phones).
The lack of a sacking may appear odd. Surely No.10 would want to be seen to have taken the initiative in removing the little racist creep.
Unless of course the public’s aversion to racist, facist sentiment is the frog in the pan of water. Every episode of facist behaviour that is (semi) tolerated notches the temperature of the water up by a degree or two.
What were the terms of Andrew Sabisky’s contract? Who was it with? What were the conditions under which one party could terminate it unilaterally? Or was it terminated by mutual agreement? How much money will he be paid?
The Tory and Johnsonist Paul “Guido Fawkes” Staines is spreading it around that Andrew Sabisky was hired to work on the defence review and in effect as the defence spad in No. 10’s policy unit, a position that has been vacant since the departure of Christopher Brannigan last week.
If either of those assertions about Sabisky and defence is true then the incompetence shown in hiring a “blacks are on average born inferior” and “let’s allow old people to die so that we can treble military spending” idiot should be laid at Boris Johnson’s door even more than if his only role would have been to make tea for Johnson’s boss.
The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee still hasn’t been appointed. It will fall to them to decide whether or not to publish the Russia report that Boris Johnson wouldn’t allow to come out before the general election.
Harassed by hacks outside his house this morning, and clearly physically ill, Dominic Cummings told reporters to “read Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasters” (sic – the actual title is Superforecasting) rather than “political pundits who don’t know what they’re talking about”.
In context, that could be a completely reasonable thing for him to say.
Tetlock’s book is in the maths section of my library, in the subsection on probability and statistics. If the book pushed eugenics, I assure you it would be in the section on eugenics, Malthusianism, and “scientific racism”. The use of a high degree of skill at Bayesian inference does not necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with eugenics and racism. Tetlock does mention IQ a bit, but it’s not the main interest in his book.
So let’s look closely at what the context actually was. Here’s the video. A reporter asks whether Cummings is a “fan of eugenics”. Another asks about the sacking of Andrew Sabisky. We see Cummings from the moment he appears from his house. And he says to read Tetlock’s book on superforecasting. But what brought opprobrium against Sabisky wasn’t anything to do with forecasting. It was eugenics and racism. So you could say that Cummings appears to be losing it, that he is seeking to misdirect attention away from the significance of eugenics and towards the fact that some people have built up skills at forecasting.
My guess is that whereas that might be the effect, the explanation is a bit simpler: it’s that in the expectation of being harassed in the 10 metres or so between his house and the car, he thinks of a simple one-liner, probably before he goes out the door, and then he says it. One day it’s about P J Masks, another day it’s about Tetlock.
On humanitarian grounds, I condemn the repeated harassment of Dominic Cummings outside his house. Sorry, @nevermind. The guy should take some time off work to look after his health. He’s probably hoping to stay on until the budget. I won’t be surprised if Mary tells him he should put his health first.
If Sabisky was such a genius superforecaster how come he never saw this shit coming?
Muppet.
Jim
This was one of your five a day daily Tory wind-ups.
Unfortunately the foam flecks still fly out of his gagged mouth in spite of being reined in and sponged down by MI5.
Johnson is insane.
I guess Sabisky was an outlier,
so now they know how far they can go.
As far as Dominic but not quite as far as Sabisky.
Craig Murray wrote:
> Corbyn found there was no longer a sufficient well of social solidarity which could support a counter narrative to the massively concentrated media propaganda.
Meanwhile in the US, the imminent War on Truth:
“The targeting of ‘hacktivists, leaktivists and public disclosure organizations’ in the new strategy of US counterintelligence makes it clear that a major assault on First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of the press is being prepared.”
Trump administration’s national counterintelligence strategy focuses on “hacktivists, leaktivists and public disclosure organizations” — World Socialist Web Site — 15 February 2020
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/15/coun-f15.html
It’s coming now, including the UK via extradition…
And globally, in the news today:
The Death Of Free Speech: Zuckerberg Asks Governments For Instructions On “What Discourse Should Be Allowed” — Jonathan Turley — February 17, 2020
https://jonathanturley.org/2020/02/17/the-death-of-free-speech-zuckerberg-asks-governments-for-instructions-on-what-discourse-should-be-allowed/
Also, Twitter is not answering why WikiLeaks can’t publish new posts now, one week before Julian Assange’s extradition hearing.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, journalist, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks:
“WikiLeaks twitter account has been locked, shortly before Assange extradition hearing. All attempts to get it reopened via regular channels have been unsuccessful. It has been impossible to reach a human at twitter to resolve the issue. Can someone fix this? @twittersupport @jack”
Kristinn Hrafnsson (@khrafnsson) — Twitter — Feb 17, 2020
https://twitter.com/khrafnsson/status/1229454629940998144
On a positive note, after the issue went public, WikiLeak’s account has been unlocked by Twitter:
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) — Twitter
https://twitter.com/wikileaks
Repeating the same diatribe time-after-time is getting rather boring Craig.
I have seen a rich tapestry of diatribes on Craig’s site – all of them magnificent.
FUB
Even Steve Bell finds the faceless bum cheeks of the prime minister boring. S o why does such a talented artist keep repeating them over and over again? It’s called realism. The artist paints as he finds.
Could FU-Barr be one of those dim Etonians that do so much damage? Who knows?
No. Pure fiction
with aplomb, around 4am GMT this morning the venerable BBC World Service managed to utter a reasonable 30 seconds piece on Julian Assange and the worry for his well-being, quoting the letter from 100 concerned doctors.
As I fell of my chair coughing, I then caught all the early morning home service Radio Four opinion/news/nudges …. Nothing about Julian , other than a brief mention of it being the anniversary of Chelsea’s Wikileaks .Mil dump – but they managed to say that without invoking ill bearded Australian hacktivist, imprisoned for news journalism.
It was spookily quiet on the Today show, no government ministers on the subject of SPADa, no mention of this continuing story https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/former-pa-billionaire-rape-accused-21512654 [Randy Andy, duke of something, don’t bother reading it], and no mention of Julian, any other BBC’ologists with a take on this?
Are they trying to fulfill a charter need to report accurate news (just on a channel and at a time when no locals are listening) (as French pop radio stations used to do when they were forced to play 50% musique origine francophone, and not just yankee Madonna, which they did by broadcasting Brel during their early hours)
Great open door opportunity for Labour over the Sabisky scandal. Dawn Butler hits back with “A child is born without a sex”. Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion are digging up the Cambridge turf under a giant gay pride flag. Roll on with the extinction I say.
And here is the Cambridge superintendent who went on the media to defend the human rights of the criminal vandals:
https://www.elystandard.co.uk/news/superintendent-james-sutherland-wore-a-custodian-to-pride-in-ely-event-1-6214143
😀
End it all!
Central Cambridge is dominated by the colleges of the university. Neither the police nor the local council nor retailers DARE cross the high tables at the older colleges in particular. The colleges would have their guts for garters. Can you imagine somebody from the police or the council telling Trinity what to do, talking bureaucratic sh*t talk to them? No. Right.
It’s a bit like the one day of the year where half of the Cambridge university don class strips buck-arsed naked and goes cycling through the middle of the city. Not one of them gets locked up in a mental asylum. That class with its principal instititions, namely the colleges, is dictating to the police here. Quite a few of them send their brats to the Steiner school, and even if they don’t, they know somebody who does.
What James Sutherland – clearly a man of very poor judgement – says in this video is quite amazing – he goes ON AND ON AND ON justifying police non-intervention against this far-right doomsday cult that is impeding the movement of ambulances. Don’t come it with the “we are working with the ambulance and fire services”, Jamie boy. These scum are delaying the movement of ambulances. I don’t give a damn that for the moment they are “non-violent”. I have been present at a large number ofviolent protests, and I have not once seen anybody block or seek to delay the movement of an ambulance.
Sutherland says blocking a road doesn’t in itself require that an assembly be broken up. As if that’s an issue! Just break up the roadblock, mate – wear your rainbow-coloured hat if you want – and stop these b*stards from impeding the movement of ambulances. Let them gather somewhere else. Then make another video and put it on the internet when it turns out that an action group from the Cambridge chapter has sarin gased the London Underground to help the “epochal change” on its way. After all, not your responsibility, is it?
Extinction Rebellion = Daesh with posh accents and woolly hats.
N_
Dominic Cummings is busy dumbing down politics, making the disgusted from Tunbridge Wells stick their postage stamps on crooked with rage.We know extinction rebellion is an arm of corporate Torydom , as are daesh, Our simple minds cannot unravel the deviousness of right wing politics. I guess by floating up caricatures of important issues which need to be addressed and which the right wing don’t want to address, they can even create hostility to the whole issue and close it down. Northern Ireland news fatigue. They deliberately created a disaster zone to camouflage the elephant in the room, that NI is a colony like Scotland, which has long needed independence.
Unfortunately for Cummings those of us who endured the political wind-ups of Thatcher are inoculated against the disease of politics. Instead of destroying all intellectual and social analysis by headlines like yesterday’s , they just make themselves stupid.
As to Steiner, there are thousands of Steiners in the world. The basic common message is that you can by following a guru achieve a higher level of consciousness than God.
It’s an annoying message because it’s so arrogant. There are Muslim professors in Cambridge who say that they are superior in their behaviour to other Muslims.
Anybody who keeps banging on about their own superiority hasn’t understood the meaning of life. We are all brought into this life and given a set of personal tests.
I don’t have to pass your tests and you don’t have to pass my tests. So any help from any outsider, other than the actual prophet chosen by God, is superfluous.
I am a rose, I don’t need to learn how to be a convulvulus.
“A child is born without a sex”: Dawn Butler. What is this rubbish? I will be charitable and assume she is confusing sex with gender (just as posters here regularly confuse nationhood, race, ethnicity and religion in different combinations..) Maybe she meant gender is determined at birth by observing specific physical characteristics.
But then I read she is Labour shadow minister for women’s affairs. If she is going to shoot her mouth off in official, ill-informed rants about human biology on behalf of the Labour party, couldn’t they have found someone with a basic grasp of the subject? And once again, do the Labour party really believe that ignorant assertions like this, and actively promoting these views, is going to help them win the next election?
I have little time for Boris, but on this showing from Labour, even less for them. And from what I have read, the Lib Dems spokesperson on the subject is equally ill informed. Once you start inventing scientific principles to fit your political agenda., you are on a very slippery slope indeed.
@Mrs Pau!:
They want us to choose between the following ideas:
1) “a child is born without a sex”; there is nothing natural in humanity; every piece of idiotic activity encouraged by corporate advertising or engaged in “because somebody feels like it” is as valid as any other, because “freedom”; if a man says he is a woman who are any of us to impose our own reality on him, etc.
2) elite rule, loyalty to the “race”, a hierarchy of races, survival of the fittest, the elimination of the sick and weak, women shutting the hell up when they’re told – these are all natural.
They want to destroy the acceptability of ideas that conflict with BOTH of these. They want 2 to be the only available answer to 1.
So all this woke identity politics nonsense is really a far-right plot? I see you’re also calling Extinction Rebellion a far-right outfit. You, sir, have lost the plot!
Yes s/he has, totally bonkers, must be some kind of virus.
Agree, Labour needs to be associated in the public mind with waging the big structural war against capital on behalf of working people; its foundational purpose. If Kier Starmer and the PLP succeed in calling the shots I fearLabour will soon revert to waging that war in reverse, ala Macron.
But if the party does somehow remain under Left leadership it must avoid getting dragged into these trivial culture war issues, something that only benefits knee-jerk reactionaries and a plutocracy that is desperate to divert attention away from Victorian era levels of class inequality.
If they continue with this nonsense of denying science so as not to upset the beliefs of the touchy-feely then in a hundred years we’ll be back to burning witches, and it will be real women burned by men who say they’re women too then get real snotty about it.
I wondered whether there might be a streak of Nazism in Andrew Sabisky’s family, but there is no hint of racism in his grandfather Chris Brasher’s obituary of black US athlete Jesse Owen, who famously outperformed Aryan competitors at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/18/boris-johnson-panto-authoritarians-cruelty
Quite a good bit in the Guardian.
Basically they claim the new administration is moving to the Left on Economics and to the Right on laws, Immigration and Culture.
Sue Braverman, Prity Patel on the Right
with Rishi Sunak on the Left.
Further research suggests…
…that the contract Andrew Sabisky was on may have involved an outfit called Maby.
Maby does forecasting and this would explain Dominic Cummings’s reference to Tetlock’s book this morning.
Maby was founded by Michael Story and Tom Liptay. Story posted this snap of the two of them together with Sabisky outside No. 10. (Mistake!) All three guys have a record as superforecasters. Liptay was CFO of the Good Judgment Project created by Tetlock.
Maby seems to be basically a spinoff from Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project, which connects with IARPA, and you can see it’s right up Cummings’s street.
For what it’s worth, Story studied at MGIMO in Russia in between his time at UCL and the LSE. MGIMO is the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite university that comes under the Russian Foreign Ministry. (Well at least it doesn’t come under the Defence Ministry, as the Ecole Polytechnique does in France!)
C’mon, hacks – get on this one! 1) Maby, 2) Russia.
ROFL. Someone at the BBC had a skim of Tetlock’s book today…or at least they read something about it on the internet.
“Superforecasters calculate the probability of something happening and then adjust that as circumstances change.”
“Superforecasters are supposed to be particularly good at keeping their personal opinions out of the calculations.”
That’s the funniest bit. One might as well write, “Superforecasters think they’re so clever, but would they get a job at the BBC?”
“The other important part of the method is you take the probabilities estimated by a number of superforecasters and average them out to get a final result.”
What, no reference to Francis Galton and the ox?
I’m sure that N- is preparing a great speech on British nationalism vs. his very own theory at this years event.
https://www.facebook.com/marxismfest/?eid=ARB6GneQo9guSHmdECqZGmu4dVgZpM-ppKJlDu8fY2Q3E_LuaH2hiYnMbmszxrRa_K0Ll5bzMelVsGJc
If we are in a U.K. Timewarp
why do we think
Boris has chosen so many ethnic minority ministers?
Priti Patel – Home Secretary
her parents are Gujarati Ugandans.
The new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak
his parents are Punjabi East Africans.
Sue-Ellen Cassiana “Suella” Braverman is now Attorney General,
her parents are also of Indian origin.
Yet Bopris part Jewish, part Turkish,
born in America
is said to be rascist.
Yet he is married to a half Indian woman, it seems it is rather overblown to call our new primeminister a rascist.
Dominic Raab F.M.
his father is Jewish Chechoslavia
Alok Sharma, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
is also Indian.