Daniel Quinn

Corruption? How dare you sir/madam! Corruption is what those dirty little countries have! Here in the UK we have evolved beyond corruption because we’re rich, civilised and um… white… or something.

No this is just doing business. Nothing to see here. Get back to work.

I like how the response is “Quiet! Someone might hear you!”. As opposed to " What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Has Labour been any better?

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It does, and it’s one of the reasons GDP is a dumb measure for quality of life. One of the primary factors for measuring GDP is consumption, so if as a society you start growing more food locally, sharing childcare among family, or just choose to repair what’s broken rather than buy more plastic crap, your GDP craters in the face of all of these.

You’re ignoring the GDP effects of constant consumption in the form of gas. GDP is not a measure of quality of life, let alone a good economy. It goes down as you reduce consumption.

Heat pumps are a one time, up front cost, and their installation & maintenance is minor compared to the massive, 24hour spend on running a fossil economy.

To be fair, I say this not to demotivate you, but to point out that the problem isn’t innovation, or money, or as many in this country seem to think, immigrants. It’s not even landlords.

The problem is that we’ve organised our society around the wrong incentives. If we’re serious about fixing this problem (and I think your “NIS” is a great idea!) we have to approach it with the understanding that building an NIS must start ith abandoning our bad models and ridiculing those that insist it can be done within the existing system.

We don’t necessarily need a communist revolution, but we do need to be honest about Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and begin the work of building systems that allow for them while dismantling ones that prevent them.

I love it. It makes sense if your goal is to improve the lives of the public and save money long term.

What it doesn’t do is improve GDP (this would actually have a negative effect) or enrich more billionaires. That sort of thing doesn’t tend to play well in this country.

Weird strategy. All this does is give oxygen to the the ZiR policy and by extension legitimise the Green position. I expected Labour to be smarter than that, but I’ll take it.

At this point, I think Polanski might get more milage out of just saying:

“No. No country has that right, and if they’re going to insist on genocide as a solution to their problems, I can’t understand why you insist on defending them.”

It’d to piss off the Israel fanatics, but they’re never going to support the Greens anyway. It would however take this question off the table theoretically.

It’s controversial by definition. It’s sewing controversy. In the party, in the media, and in the broader public. To pretend otherwise is to live in a world without facts.

And I don’t know what you’re on about regarding my “treats”. You and I share the same goal: liberation of the Palestinian people, but while you’re content to derail any progress we might have made on that front in an effort to “cleanse” the party, I’d rather we find a way to do something for them. Nice use of the word “cleanse” there, very inclusive. I’m sure the people who still associate Zionism with Judaism and fear another Holocaust would absolutely love to be part of a party with people using that sort of language.

This isn’t a conversation that’s going to be productive (much like every other conversation around this over the next 6-12 months) so I’m tapping out. You should come back to this in a year though and ask yourself just what this stunt has wrought and how we might have better served Palestine with that time if only we hadn’t been obsessed with tightening the noose of virtue around each other.

Of course I agree with the motion. I’m a thinking person with a reasonable understanding of the history of the region. I’m assuming you are too, but I hate to break it to you, you aren’t most people.

Most people don’t understand that Zionism ≠ Judaism and this motion will absolutely not help in their education. It will alienate them, and the media will have more ammo to paint us with the “extreme crazies” brush. Worse still, people within the party who have joined, perhaps even as their first foray into politics are going to feel alienated. The party will appear to have been co-opted by a bunch of masturbatory academics, bent on spending time and resources defining a word that has no effect other than to piss people off and alienate them. Indeed that’s all the party’s been talking about over the last few days: the fact that this motion is meaningless. So what have we accomplished exactly?

This is a classic case of the Left’s favourite pastimes: purity tests and virtue signalling. Now everyone who pushed for this meaningless exercise can pat themselves on the back for being enlightened and they can look down on everyone who opposed it, abstained, or dared to clarify its meaning as Polanski has done here. Then, when the taste of that passes, they can get back to sabotaging any real work (which requires cooperation, something these people cannot understand) by choosing a new group of people to alienate.

Next up: the meat-eaters. It’s bad for the animals and the environment. Fuck those guys. Let’s pass a motion declaring meat-eating evil. Actually, that’s not good enough. Roll the pansy-assed vegetarians in there because they lack the conviction of proper vegans.

This is what this sort of politics breeds, and it doesn’t stop until you have a party of just 8 people who think they’re better than everyone else while giving the other 7 the side-eye.

Politics is about community and working with others — others who may not agree with you on everything, who may not have made the same journey you have (yet?) to come to the same conclusions, but you have enough in common to pull together to get things done. These people have done the opposite. They’ve driven a wedge into the party for zero benefit, to (as you say) “filter out” people they don’t like. Palestinians won’t benefit from a bunch of Britons defining a word. They would have benefitted from the blockage of arms sales to Israel, but they’ve set back any progress we could have possibly had on that now.

It’s just so dumb, and selfish, and navel-gazing. And the reaction here to Polanski, rejecting him if he should dare do anything other than to embrace this idiot motion… it’s just so counterproductive.

How though? You can still accept that Zionism is racism (it is) and make the statements he has here. If the contention is that Zionist == Jew, then that would lead to the exclusion of some people based on religious belief, but as Zionism and Judaism are distinct ideas, nothing he said here is unreasonable. He wouldn’t have to say anything if this dumb motion hadn’t been brought to a vote in the first place.

This motion was toxic af to the entire party and if I didn’t know better I’d think it was designed to be just that. It offers no tangible benefit to the party, nor to anyone on the planet, especially Palestinians who might have benefited from having a party with stated goals of their liberation with some power in the UK. Now we have to spend the next year or so digging into the academic weeds with the public explaining just what Zionism is, why we oppose it, and how the policy is effectively meaningless as it excludes no one, but for some reason a bunch of ideological puritans insisted that this be the thing we’re all talking about. Not climate change, not wealth disparity, and certainly not the plight of the Palestinians.

It’s absolutely absurd how the Left is so hell-bent on destroying itself with purity tests and virtue signalling.

Welcome to the team!

I’m sure he’s really broken up about that /s.

It’s not the best defence of the policy that could have been made, but frankly the fact that GBNews even allowed him to talk about it rather than shouting over him is better than I’ve seen from other outlets.

Oh no! Anyway…

It’s absolutely racism, but I fail to see how defining a word is something that needs a vote within a political party. It sounds like a great way to sew division in a time when having everyone just agree to oppose genocide is hard enough.

Asset in partnership, absolutely, but there’s a sizable chunk of this country that sees treating other nations as equals as “losing”.

E-bikes are many times cheaper than both!