Deaths of Despair Soar in the UK

“Labour, before Corbyn often voted for Conservative austerity bills” looks really weird! Might want to add a comma after Corbyn! 🙂

In the US, we have a pretty clear split between the lower 80 and upper 20 percent of the population. I don’t know what the exact split is in the UK, but it has something similar. Even the NYT had an article a couple of days ago about the “shrunken” lives of rural Brits. Indeed you can make the comparison between the rural, not Ile de France, gilet jaune movement in France and what’s going on in both the US and UK.

All these countries are wealthy. All of them have the resources to take care of their citizens and provide them with the wherewithal for a meaningful life, and they aren’t because the ruling classes of these countries are too greedy and have stolen too much from the rest of us. They would rather see us die of despair than lift a finger or return a cent they have stolen. This is the reality, and what we need to internalize is that this was something that we did not do to ourselves. It was done to us. And it is a crime, as deep and fundamental as crime can get, and those who did it are criminals of an equally deep and fundamental kind.

@ Hugh

+1

Most of the “20%” are not really the ruling class of course, just the high class servants, but they remain remarkably confident they will be protected and that their credentials justify a relatively protected position in a system of immiseration they administer.

From my personal experience, the deep arrogance of an upper-class Brit makes the snootiest American I know seem like a hillbilly. If those are the people who need to give a damn to save the UK I am not optimistic.

Sames dynamic as here in America–only substitute “Bernie Sanders” for “Jeremy Corbin” and “Democratic Party” for “Labor.” Main difference is that because of our presidential system, voting for a corporatist Democrat like Joe Biden is about as bad as voting for Trump–and 90% of Democratic office holders are corporatists.

Speaking of oligarchs, there was a stunning news segment last night on the local CBS affiliate.

Our local poohbahs moved the baseball stadium out to the wealthy suburbs. The venue is now difficult, if not impossible, to get to using public transportation.

So last night, with hilarious fanfare, game attendees were reduced to a panic-stricken mini-mob because the ride-share people were nowhere to be found. The entitled doofuses kept going to the spot for ride-share pickups and going to pieces when no rides showed up for them.

It reminded me of what Ian says about having to make these people uncomfortable to get their attention. I’m going to check the local papers this morning to confirm it, but it looked like those doodle-heads at the game did not even know a ride-share strike was underway, so I suspect the local press did not even publish the news.

I have struggled with suicidal depression my entire life based on a very bad history of child abuse. It was handed down, best as I can deconstruct, from two sources: 1/ a gentle Polish kid who enlisted in the U.S. Army for WWII and came back with shell shock that no one new how to treat; and 2/ a slightly less gentle Russian kid who went to Fordham to be a linebacker in the days when leather helmets were the standard issue uniform for those who entertained the masses. Both took their own lives, the first when he inadvertently lit a cigarette that set his whisky doused clothing aflame, and the second when he put a gun to his head to relieve what we now know has to have been CTE. Both of their kids, my parents, are irrevocably damaged, even though one was \”successful,\” and they left both myself and my sister bleeding like so much road kill. Neither really knows how to fix that, even on a recognition in late life that they are \”culpable\” in some fashion, because society has no place for that, and, in fact, cares little for it because it doesn\’t make money (still the strangest fictional concept we all ever agreed to). It can\’t deal with the generation in front of it, and the substantive problems it creates actually persist over multiple generations. It is the individual\’s job to be adaptable, but to what? A species that races to its own extinction? Sometimes one just has to scream, for whatever it\’s worth, because that is what society has collectively chosen to leave us (I want to note Rosa Luxembourg\’s the only thing worse than being abused by capitalism, is not being abused by capitalism). Abuse, as Derrick Jensen pointed out so well, is the system\’s lifeblood. But yes, some kind of violent change will come, Michael Parenti\’s warning notwithstanding that the elite are delighted to resolve class conflict with fascism, and despite the fact that the police where I live are very well practiced in it. But I think there are many who find no comfort in bread and circuses, and anger is potent, and moreover, uncontainable at some level. I have a \”good\” job and there are days I\’d happily loose the guillotine\’s blade myself.

Apologies, I will go practice my Metta now, a practice for which I am eternally grateful. I just needed a place to scream today.

Upper class Brits know they have nothing to fear, the plebeians weapons were seized two decades ago…of course, the upper class got to keep their weapons.

While Corbyn has decent ideals, he doesn’t have the steel nerve required.

As Upton Sinclair said, :“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But Pinker is more than this. He is a well paid propagandist. He is perfectly willing not to understand, and promote his brand of not understanding, as long as he continues to get his cut.

It’s interesting the circumlocutions that are used to paper over millions of people having their lives’ ruined: economic dislocations, creative destruction, globalization, free trade, the Marketplace, etc.

IBW

There is plenty of blame to rightly spread around about that war between the hard hats and the hippies.

Yes, racism played a role. Yes, the hard hats took their gains for granted and thought that the Repugs too were “their friends” (George Meany and the AFL-CIO endorsing Nixon over McGovern in 1972). Yes, you see the effects of the defense industry working-class vote (Scoop Jackson’s following). One of the problems with a successful economic system is that the more people ‘win’, the more they become conservatives, defenders of the status quo. The hard hats couldn’t conceive that the real goal of the Right was to move them back to the Guilded Age, even though if they had paid attention to Reagan and Goldwater they could have seen it (I have book on my shelf, ‘danger on the right’, which discusses what it calls the ‘extreme right’ of that day, which includes William F. Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, and which shows you the extent the Overton Window shifted. Now all these people are our ‘blessed icons’).

But then again, many of the hippies also thought America had too much affluence, too much materialism, and that material stuff didn’t matter. So there was a disconnect there too.

The Pure Left is heard from–oh, right, this is a Pure Left site. My bad. 🙄

S. Brennan,

History and culture are not driven by sekrit conspiracies and lone individuals or handful thereof, in the final analysis. It’s run by the vast bulk of people voting with their feet, pursuing what they think is in their short-term best interests.

Now, all those people are often wrong about their choices; misinformed, biased, and foolish. They often think they are getting something that they are not, or can’t see there is a long-term huge negative consequence of their choices that will occur after they get their short-term bird-in-the-hand.