WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
I read this earlier and it didn't paint a great picture of the current state of NHS mental health services,


Incisive read, will forward on (multitasking working and watching the Huns get fucked by Dortmund)

Buckling rather than growing need, eg a team of about 6-8 serving half a city here. Haemorrhaging staff, getting worse, eg mental health teams needing occupational health ninjas. Look at volume of NHS vacancies in your area for evidence. Scary

A deliberate/ongoing govt strategy to draw public/pvt £ initiatives into play, parachuted in, “see, we can’t fund everything”. Social care apocalypse = pull pvt hospitals into backlog
 

vimothy

yurp
'There is a gathering trend among neomarxists to finally bury all aspiration to positive economism (‘freeing the forces of production from capitalist relations of production’) and install a limitless cosmic despair in its place. Who still remembers Khruschev’s threat to the semicapitalist West—“we’ll bury you”? Or Mao’s promise that the Great Leap Forward would ensure the Chinese economy leapt past that of the uk within 15 years? The Frankfurtian spirit now rules: Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse (“we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?”)'
-- Nick Land, Critique of Transcendental Miserablism
one interesting aspect of this is that land failed to note (or perhaps it was only just emerging into prominence) a substantial parallel strain of miserabilism on the right. "america is a communist country" etc.
 

luka

Well-known member
GOT THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE FROM A CONTRIBUTOR WHO WISHES TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS... UNLESS EVERYONE SAYS THAT'S A REALLY CLEVER IDEA, WHAT GENIUS THOUGHT THAT UP.

re: the grandma defence in that dissent thread,

i've noticed that invasive new technologies are sometimes justified on these grounds,

like "alexa" will be really helpful for the disabled,

thin end of the wedge

but it's too controversial to post in the thread.
my coy correspondant offers this as an example

Guardian Pick​



It seems very trendy to slag off fb, yes it has its faults but it provides entertainment and communication in various forms to many people and it is a life line for people who are isolated for whatever reason or who find actual socialising difficult. If it died tomorrow it would be greatly missed. Careful what you wish for.
 

vimothy

yurp
what we've ended up with is a strange situation in which the right thinks the left has won, and the left thinks the right has. the (italian catholic) philosopher augusto del noce had an interesting take on this, discussing a 1969 debate in the french journal espirit between a socialist thinker, jean-marie domenach, who argued that the right was triumphant, and a reactionary, thomas molnar, who argued that in fact the left was:

'If by “right” we mean faithfulness to the spirit of tradition, meaning the tradition that talks about an uncreated order of values, which are grasped though intellectual intuition and are independent of any arbitrary will, not even the divine one; and if by “left” we mean, on the contrary, the rejection not merely of certain historical superstructures but of those very values, which are “unmasked” to show their true nature as oppressive ideologies, imposed by the dominant classes in order to protect themselves, well, then it seems that in no other historical period has the left advanced so dramatically as during the last quarter of a century…. And yet, one has to say that Domenach is right: if by “right” we mean “management technique at the service of the strongest,” regardless of what ideologies are used to justify this management, we have to say that its victory has never been so complete, because it has been able to turn completely the culture of the left into its own tool.'
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The lines of division run down the middle of institutions - so, neither left nor right “controls” the media, but one tranche of the BBC is a liberal redoubt while another is a state propaganda machine. All institutions are bound in some way to serve and protect the status quo, and make juicy targets for capture by those who wish to alter the status quo; everything is continually in play. Total control neither achievable nor desirable: players without adversaries lose their edge, and/or turn on one another. Leftist infighting strongest in leftist strongholds.
 

sufi

lala
in plainer language:
the right have captured the economy while the left have captured society.
and neither would have it any other way - there is no way that the right individuals would abandon their cosy social rights now, and no way the left can live without pumpkin mochacinno
 
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sufi

lala
so what happens next -
the bosses are in retreat to their fastnesses with their loot, pursued by social pressure that leaves them more and more hated and isolated,
because the rich have all the materiel, the inevitable showdown will be very assymettrical
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
Yeah recently my dad and I were waiting for his friend to pick us up from the airport, and we went into a hotel bar to get a drink, and we needed to complete some multi-page questionnaire first, so we both thought never mind then.
I was ranting about this to my mate the other day. How the digitisation of our lives has just led to crushing constant fucking admin rather than being liberated by technology. It was sparked by me having a free afternoon in London so I thought I'd pop into the national gallery for a bit. But then it turns out that you can't just walk in. You have to scan a QR code, download an app, choose a password, get told your password isn't good enough, choose another password, fill out your name and address, then go to your email, download a bar code etc etc etc

We get forced into constantly giving completely useless data to others, filling in little forms that no one will ever read. Everyday life becomes like having a really, really dull job in the civil service

What was this thread about again?
 

Leo

Well-known member
I was ranting about this to my mate the other day. How the digitisation of our lives has just led to crushing constant fucking admin rather than being liberated by technology. It was sparked by me having a free afternoon in London so I thought I'd pop into the national gallery for a bit. But then it turns out that you can't just walk in. You have to scan a QR code, download an app, choose a password, get told your password isn't good enough, choose another password, fill out your name and address, then go to your email, download a bar code etc etc etc

We get forced into constantly giving completely useless data to others, filling in little forms that no one will ever read. Everyday life becomes like having a really, really dull job in the civil service

What was this thread about again?

and in a few months they'll complain that attendance is down.
 
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