Held onto any political ideation until I'd had some sleep
Slept like a baby, so maybe I'm onto something here.
All in all, I think "Labour win a landslide" is the worst of the likely outcomes of this election, and the 2nd worst of the technically-possible outcomes (I mean they could have fucked it somehow and failed to secure a majority?)
I will obviously take this over an extension of Tory rule, but the way the party has lurched to the right over the last 4 years while abandoning any pretence of ambition means I consider a landslide electoral victory a really bad outcome for anyone with an interest in improving life in this country.
This victory has been projected for literal years at this point, and with a dead-cert win on the cards any progressive party worthy of the category would have put some ambition into its campaign, some kind of radical adjustment into it's policy, but instead Labour went hyper-safe into right-wing "secure borders," "antisocial behaviour," and "we love financial services" rhetoric and was rewarded with a Tory collapse to vindicate their cowardice.
We won't see an ambitiously left-wing Labour party in our lifetime.
Anyway I'd love to be wrong, I'm really praying the manifesto was just a way to guarantee a mandate so they can go hard on public services, but their manifesto drained the joy from my body. I'm fine with people celebrating a victory over a Tory party that propped itself up with literal fascism, I just can't share the optimism.
Extremely battered Stats Hat on for this one.
Having done a bit of number scanning, my key takeaway is that my expectations about the mechanics of this election were about right - this is less a Labour resurgence than it is a collapse of the Tory and SNP vote - both losing about half the popular vote they had in 2019.
Hell, Labour got fewer votes this time than in 2019 - 9.7M (final counts pending) vs 10.2M.
This does not bode well for UK politics.
The clearest indicator of this collapse was the "resurgence" of the Lib Dems. They're currently tallying fewer votes than 2019 (3.5M vs 3.6M) but have gone from 11 seats to 71.
Overall turnout dropped from 67% to barely 60%.
My hypothesis is that people just broadly did not give a shit, and Tories would rather stay home than pick an alternative. I may grab a dataset to try to back this up later.
I forgot to mention the wee fascists in this post
They hoovered up a bunch of Tory votes, so thanks for that but honestly fuck 'em.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best
- The Communist Manifesto
thinking about how it's pretty common to critique the total failure of systems that are naïvely described as "merotocratic" to actually elevate the most meritorious people, when in fact the whole idea of meritocracy is in fact born of the false belief that people can have an absolute "merit" (let alone that it determines how much power they should be able to exert) - nex3
A key moment in my professional and personal development was when I was reading a ton of data science / machine learning articles for work, I found one in which the author outlined a very solid approach to comparing model performance, then completely undermined it (intentionally) with a paragraph on the inadequacy of "merit" as a concept.
He wasn't simply attacking overly simplistic ML assumptions, but tied the difficulty of defining "merit" in a sterile computational system to professional, social, and political ones - if we're losing sleep objectively defining the quality of a statistical construct, how could we ever be comfortable applying that logic to the messy systems of human interaction and governance.
It was a relatively short aside in a fairly unimportant article, but the comfort with which the author pivoted from technical to fiercely political was genuinely inspiring to me, and still informs a lot of my thinking.
The more I learn about financial systems, and specifically the artifices that support the modern economic system, the less convinced I am that we ever should have allowed any kind of value-abstraction into our lives.
It's not so far past "International Trade Agreements are kinda bullshit as an incentive structure" to get to "I wonder if we should never have allowed the concept of a company as an entity with rights," and then it's just a matter of time before you conclude "maybe ~money~ is the problem."
i know i'm not saying anything revolutionary here, but:
any "progressives" or "leftists" who you can compel into doing the "LGBTQ+ people are degenerate faggot groomers" shtick through framing it in cushy, progressive-sounding language is someone you should just assume has "correct politics" through moral luck and not actual principles. if they had met the wrong person at any point in their life they'd be fascists in Nick Fuentes's stream chat or posting on Kiwifarms—and accordingly you should not trust them with anything sensitive, ever - alyaza birze
"Moral luck" is a great phrase for it.
I've mentioned this before but there are clearly people in the world (some with very prominent platforms) who've just blundered through life with mostly good opinions and so have never had to do any self-reflection on it. I think the last time I said this was about Adam Ragusea.
When these people have a shitty opinion on instinct, they will lean on their decades of being basically right and just assume they're doing nothing wrong - it's not them that doesn't understand the situation, it's you the outsider to their golden instincts.
It feels like to be a genuinely decent leftist, and especially a decent ally to an experience not one's own, it helps massively to have held some moderately shitty views that have been challenged and overcome. Like, not "I used to be a nazi but I got the tattoos turned into flowers and pride flags" shitty, but something meaningfully mean-spirited that you've interrogated and removed from your heart.
I could just feel that way because I was a total asshole as a teenager though.
Watching a Persona challenge run video and... look, I'm just interested how you went about doing something I have no interest in doing myself. You whined about failing fights a bunch with your ruleset, but fuck it man, you did the work I didn't so I'm not about to give you shit, armchair quarterbacking your decisions.
But buddy, when you look at dozens of articles by queer people disappointed in how P4 handles queer themes and say they're getting it all wrong - buddy. I'm gonna vague-post about you, and you're gonna have to live with that shame.
The whole fucking persona thing is literally bookended with "Thou are I, and I am thou". There's no ambiguity there. The shadow versions of them are reflections of their true selves, not exclusively other people's perspectives of them. They have to live with those aspects of themselves whether they want to or not, because that's who they are. Kanji alone disproves the idea that it's external pressures driving their self-denial.
That's so incredibly core to the theming of the first 99% of Persona 4. That's why the epilogue is a kick in the face to queer folk - every queer narrative is resolved with "ah, but it's so much easier being normal with my complementary gender romantic interest."
Look, I love P4, it's the first one I played and it still scratches the same itch it did in 2009 - but you've got to reckon with how that biases your reading of it if you're gonna post about it in your video.
Buddy, I was gonna follow you until you decided to bring your "I could write an essay" shithead analysis into your unrelated challenge video. You didn't have to say shit about it, but here we are.
Dipshit.